Dark Space - A Sick Fic
by Noelemahc
Summary: In the year 2012, a man wakes up from a five-year long coma in a military hospital. He doesn't remember much of anything before it, but what he does remember is this vivid dream he seems to have had while he was out. One about starships, ancient monstrosities and a colourful assortment of aliens fighting at his side. But why do his fellow patients remind him of them so much?
1. Chapter 1 - Awakening

**AWAKENING**

Waking up was the hardest part, as usual with these things. He had a vague recollection of talking to a semi-transparent, glowing child that was telling him to do something... But what was he saying? And what did he finally do? He remembered a sensation of burning, the putrid stench of burning hair, cooking flesh - his own flesh - but precious little beyond that before there was a blinding flash of light that sent his mind reeling, spiraling back into darkness, like it did once before already. That particular memory was equally jarring - the sensation of falling, falling indefinitely, feeling cold, suffocating, and then burning up, burning until it felt that his entire body was formed of flames...

This time was different. He didn't feel burning from the outside, but from the inside - at least until he lost consciousness. And, just as before, waking up from death was unpleasant and confusing, full of blinding colours and deafening sounds that in actuality were probably very mundane - his body simply forgot where the point separating "quiet" from "loud" lay.

"-awake. He's actually awake!" he finally made out someone say, or at least thought he did. His entire body felt like a rock that had lain in one place so long, it could barely be seen under all the moss covering it, and right now that moss was pinning him down. Except that it felt oddly... fabric-like?

He was suddenly aware that someone was leaning over him, looking into his eyes, probably checking whether he was really awake. The sensation was not very pleasant, and the light they shone into his eyes left a blazing trail of pain and blindness among the blurry white background of what he assumed to be the ceiling.

"Commander? Can you hear me?" he thought the vague shape said. Mouthed. Whatever. He wasn't exactly sure he was interpreting his sensations correctly. Perhaps whoever rebuilt his brain this time out got some wires crossed, and he was seeing smells and hearing colours? But through the painful dryness of his nostrils, he could discern... something, and he was certain he smelled smells, because while he couldn't really tell WHAT it was he was smelling, the feeling intensified when he inhaled and that meant-

The pounding of blood in his temples and the dark spots in his field of view screamed "asphyxia" in the loudest voice that sensations could probably scream. He got too focused on his thoughts and forgot to breathe? Was the damage really that bad? Wait, more thoughts, more blood to the brain, more oxygen draw-

"His BP is all messed up, breathing ragged, it's like he's trying to hyperventilate, but can't!"

"Get the machine back on, he obviously cannot breathe on his own just yet."

"But you said-"

"And now I'm saying to turn it back on, please. Sometime this year, before the patient suffocates on his own panic?"

"Done, doctor, but his stats are still..."

The voice faded out as if someone turned the volume down all the way on a holo, and with it, went the vision as well.

* * *

He was more aware of things now that the oxygen came rushing back through his bloodstream - though he wasn't quite sure how it got there. His mouth felt like it was lined with felt - literally - except for the suspiciously smooth tube... ah, that was apparently what was doing his breathing for him. Interesting discovery.

Something in the view of the room felt off - a quick realization suggested "position of light" - he somehow apparently missed the passing of an hour or two. Probably because he blacked out halfway through the scramble to get him to breathe on his own. His vision was sliding in and out of focus as he first panicked at the thought of how he was supposed to breathe with the tube in his throat, but the panic subsided at the realization that the tube was not so much feeding him air as pumping it in him. The sensation, while not particularly pleasant, allowed him to relax again and, mostly against his will, he slid off into sleep.

* * *

He tried moving his arms, but all he could get from them was a vague sensation of pulling that didn't actually feel like moving anywhere. Legs produced the same result. His eyeballs moved with a painful creaky sensation of well-rusted hinges being flexed for the first time in years. At least his vision was starting to come into focus, and with that, he started to take in his surroundings for the first time since... he wasn't even sure how long ago his first awakening was, or whether it even was in the same place as this one. Still, it paid to pay attention.

Dull white ceiling, tiled, some of the tiles actually off-colour to the others, as if they were either very old or very dirty. Possibly both. Migraine-inducing light green (or possibly beige) walls - of that particular colour that some manual somewhere probably said helped soothe the nerves, but since the colour itself as printed in the manual was a little off, and nobody picked the exact precisely identical colour when picking paints, the walls were exactly that. Migraine-inducing. He cringed at the thought and the sensation it produced, including the same mossy stone feeling in his face as the one that his arms were subjected to.

Wide windows letting in a lazy sunlight the colour of a downing sun, a snippet of partly cloudy sky visible through it, some ancient-looking metal furniture, what looked like a wardrobe or closet - also metal, painted the same insane colour as the walls, but the paint on it was older, chipped in many places, like it belonged elsewhere originally and was moved here for lack of an alternative. The last object in the room to attract his attention was the door - or rather, wall containing the door - frosted glass that didn't really conceal much of anything, the door being little more than a plastic (or suspiciously plastic-looking metal) frame around a pane of the same frosted glass as the wall, the only other addition besides the doorknob being a number plate he couldn't see from the inside.

_"Either I'm stuck in a Krogan hospital, or there's something very wrong going on here,"_ was the first thought of the day that he formulated in words rather than emotions, and it was underscored by the ward door opening to admit a person in a white doctor's coat that felt right in its place in the context of the room - but not in his mind. Too... primitive?

"Good morning, Commander," the newcomer said. A woman, late twenties, blue eyes, freckles, jet-black hair slicked back in a manner more pertinent for a young man - his eyes took note of the details in an almost automatic fashion, noting them away for... what, exactly?

"W-w-where am I?" he finally squeezed out of himself. His throat felt dry - he was suddenly aware that the tube was gone and he was breathing for himself once more, but he caught the panic before it managed to set in and disrupt his breath again. The dryness made him cough, and that felt like sandpaper being dragged across the whole of his windpipe. The doctor nodded off to the side of him, and, with considerable effort, he turned his head to see a nightstand with a glass of water on top of it. Another attempt to raise an arm failed, however, and he turned to the doctor once more. "A little help?" he wheezed at her.

"Of course," she replied, getting the glass and helping him get a few small sips of water which he forced into himself, languishing in the soothing coldness of it and hoping it would help him speak without hurting himself.

"To answer your earlier question, Commander," the doctor said, settling herself down on one of the chairs and crossing her legs to rest the datapad she was carrying on her knee, apparently to take notes, or maybe look up notes, he wasn't really certain, "You are in a military hospital best suited for your current condition."

"And that is?" he asked cautiously, still wondering why his hands wouldn't obey him as his head, at least, seemed to finally succumb to his will.

"Neural damage of unknown extent that caused you to enter an unconventional coma that has lasted-" she paused to check the datapad, "-four years and eight months. Do you remember your name, Commander?"

"Shepard." The reply came almost instantaneously.

"First name?"

"Er..."

He paused, racking his brain. It felt oddly... empty. Devoid of knowledge. Not that he couldn't remember - there was nothing TO remember. The thought scared him.

"I... I don't remember," he finally admitted, almost shamefully.

"Great. Your birthdate?"

"April 11th," he replied without thinking. That, too came back far too easily.

"What year is it now?"

"I don't know. What year is it now, doctor?" he asked, his voice on the verge of neurosis now.

"It's 2012, Commander."

"And what is my first name?"

"I don't know," she replied with a wry smile, "So you'll have to remember. It's part of the process to overcoming your apparent amnesia."

"Great. I have memory loss and you won't help me with my name. Can I at least learn yours? Please? Tell me who you are," his voice, almost pleading, was shaking ever-so-slightly.

"Of course. I am your attending doctor, and my name is Lara Tasoni," she replied with another smile. "You are in good hands, Commander Shepard."


	2. Chapter 2 - Realization

**REALIZATION**

_"It's her. Forget the skintone, the hair - it even looks like an asari crest - it's her. The voice, the face, the smirk. Liara T'Soni... Or Lara Tasoni? What kind of a name is that, anyway?"_

"Interesting name. Greek?" he ventured out loud, hoping his shocked expression at hearing her name wasn't too surprising.

"Georgian, actually, but thanks anyway. Most people assume it's Italian for some reason," the doctor replied, turning her attention back to the datapad. He noticed it wasn't that dissimilar from the datapads he was used to - except it wasn't transparent, and the back plate had an image of a bitten apple on it - probably the manufacturer's logo.

Another attack of willpower against misbehaving muscles finally produced a result, as one of his arms managed to emerge from under the covers - pale, slightly saggy skin looking unsavory in the dying light of the ending day as the emaciated arm reached out to touch his face. Tracing the oh-so-familiar pattern of the scars on his cheeks, he cocked an eyebrow quizzically (or, at least, hoped that he managed to do it, his entire body felt like a rusty mechanism being restarted again after a few centuries of disuse - and if this was really 2012, the centuries **were** literal).

"What exactly happened to me?" he asked finally, tapping the scars as she looked up at him from whatever she was writing down.

"You don't remember?" she asked earnestly. It wasn't a personal question, he realized after a moment's thought - she was still taking notes on his health.

"Would I have asked if I did?" he asked instead of replying, "I remember some sort of battle, and a blinding light - and then dreaming an endless dream without waking, until I finally did wake - here and now," he added slowly, trying to determine what was going on. Was this a simulation? Was this how Reaper indoctrination worked? Twisting your memories around you, shifting the context so that your mind would be unprepared to deal with it? They were in for a rough ride, then.

"A dream? Lasting all this time?" she asked, seemingly not intending to satisfy his initial question.

"Yes. It's a little fuzzy now, but... Yeah, I think I remember it far better than whatever came before it."

"Before you awoke, what happened in the dream?"

"I died," he replied somberly, finally letting go of his face and letting the arm drop back onto the bed. It didn't even seem to make much of an indentation on the sheets, a stark change from what he remembered it to be like the last time he saw it - but was that actually his arm he saw before? Or the one he was seeing now? He was shaken from his reverie by the doctor's words.

"I see. To answer your earlier question - you _were_ in a battle. It's classified, and I am privy only to minor details, but at some point in a combat situation, a streetlight collapsed on top of you, cracking your skull and uniting you with a high-voltage cable, delivering an electric shock straight to your head. The scars you felt are from the electric burns, that's why they're so geometrically orderly.

He felt the back of his head gingerly, as if expecting to find an open wound or touch his exposed brain.

"Cracked my skull?" he repeated slowly. So did he dream it all - the Reapers, the Normandy? Or was this the simulation trying to justify itself?

"Yes. Don't bother looking for a hole - this was almost five years ago, after all," the doctor replied with a small smile, as if speaking to a child, "We did the best we could with your body, but the brain we didn't dare touch, not until you woke up, at least."

"Which brings me to my second major question," he went on, nodding at her reply, filing the information away. So far, outside of the creepy resemblance to Liara, everything that she said or did made sense within the context of this hospital, and he had no reason to tip his hand. If this was reality, and Normandy the dream, then appearing insane was not in his interests, and the amnesia played into his hand. If this was a dream, or a hallucination or whatever else it may or may not have been, and the Normandy was real, then he had to conceal the fact that he was onto them. Whoever they were that put him here. And these two mutually exclusive situations both meant he had to act cautiously.

"Shoot," she replied with another familiar smile. He shuddered, or tried to, but his body didn't respond too well to the instinctual reaction.

"Why is my body all wasted away?" he asked with a mix of dejection and genuine loss. While he did sometimes act neglectful of his well-being, he did enjoy having a well-toned body that swiftly responded to his every whim, both in battle... and outside of it.

"Muscles deteriorate if not given regular exercise," she replied in a lecturing tone, "And so a fit person becomes a regular person, and a regular person becomes a frail person, and a frail person becomes a comatose patient that hadn't had to use any of his muscles that weren't his heart or lungs for a good portion of the last five years," she paused to take a breath, and continued, "Which leads us to the current situation. Don't worry, Commander, you're not the first man to end up in this situation, and there are special recuperation programs for getting you back into whatever shape you were before," she finished with a knowing smile. Apparently, she **was**here for when he was signed in, he concluded.

"Great. And how do I go to the bathroom until I can walk on my own?" he asked in an annoyed tone.

"The same way you did while you were out, I'm afraid. Catheter for urination, sponge baths for hygiene," she responded in a consoling tone, or what passed for a consoling tone with her manner of speech - human or asari, she still retained the same edge of emotionlessness in everything she said. Except that in an asari, this was a lot less unnerving. This made him wonder...

"If I may ask a personal question, doctor?"

"Yes, you may, and the answer is "no", because I am not interested in men," she replied matter-of-factly, as if this was a question she was frequently asked and frequently had to answer.

"Thanks for the warning, although that was not my question," he admitted, wishing that this particular TMI did not just happen for real, as his question was far more embarassing and uncomfortable.

"Oh. Sorry about that, I-" she tried to apologize, but he cut her short inasmuch as that was possible for his stunted speaking ability.

"Yeah, you probably get that a lot from patients, but certainly not from comatose ones?" he offered in a comforting tone, before manning up to ask her, "It's just that in my dream... I saw someone who looked - and spoke - very much like you. Please, I have to ascertain something - how is your mother's health?"

The question hung in silence for quite a while as he saw colour rise in her cheeks, and it was not shame. It was fury. She stood up sharply, almost overturning the chair.

"H-how dare- how did you-"

"Easy, doctor," he interjected quickly before this got out of hand, "I just woke up from a coma, remember? I'm trying to make heads or tails of whether it's something I dreamt or maybe just overheard while I was out," he explained, "And I certainly did not mean to offend you. You don't have to answer if this is painful for you-"

"No, it's alright," she interrupted, raising her palm in the universal sign of interruption and offering peace (interesting, how these things often went hand-in-hand in human communication, he mused to himself), before visibly composing herself to reply, "She died a little under four years ago, Commander. Murdered by terrorists that tried to protest the arrest of some major comrade or something like that - they took over the building where she worked and she was one of those executed by them to prove their point."

"Oh. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to-" he tried to say, but was cut off with another gesture.

"Don't worry, it's in the past and it's certainly not your fault," she said slowly, as if thinking each word over carefully, "But what intrigues me, is why did you ask that? Did you- dream something?"

"Well-" he hesitantly began, "-the you in my dream, or whoever looked like you, her mother died before her eyes. Tall, coldly beautiful, dressed mostly in black, always covering her... head," he congratulated himself inwardly for dancing around the word _crest_, "and also an only parent," he added almost as an afterthought. Judging by the narrowing of the doctor's eyes, he hit bullseye. Unless he had psychic abilities, this probably meant that somehow one world did bleed into the other. The question, naturally, being which one was the reality and which the dream?

"I... will have to think this over," she finally replied, her face an expression of anguish at the memories mixed with the confusion of a suddenly no-longer comatose man knowing her family history and the cold clinical interest of a doctor tasked with studying a hitherto-unseen phenomenon, "While you have to get some rest, I'm sure you've had more than enough excitement for today, Commander. I will return in the morning and we will have to formulate your recovery plan, if that's alright with you?"

"Sure. I'm not going anywhere without that, am I?" he replied with what he tried to make a smile. It seemed as though only speech returned to him readily, while the rest of his body was intent on staying as dormant and as unresponsive as possible for as long as it could.

"Indeed. Good night, Commander," she said, opening the door.

"Good night, doctor Tasoni."


	3. Chapter 3 - Orientation

**ORIENTATION**

Learning how to walk again was torture, plain and simple. His mind remembered clearly how to run, dodge, weave, climb, how to twist in mid-air if he wanted to steer it in zero-g. How to kick out if you wanted to break someone's leg cleanly, and how to do it if you wanted their bones to shatter into a dozen pieces. How to bunch up so a fall from a greater height would not break any bones, or how to spread out to slow down a descent during a HALO jump. How to swim in high-g conditions and how to handle yourself in high-density gas atmo, when the pressure made them thick enough to swim in - and enough to crush your hardsuit into a mess of broken flesh and metal if you weren't careful. Fighting in the ultimate of hardest environments - he remembered learning all of that... and none of it was of any use in a situation where his own body did not obey him anymore.

The gym was absurdly archaic, the treadmills little more than sheets of plastic and rubber on rotating cylinders that could, nevertheless, alter the speed and elevation - and that was enough for the first step to recovery. Literally.

"Come on, Shepard, surely you remember how to put one foot in front of the other," another patient egged on, resting against a training machine that seemed to be intended to burden one's triceps with a simple pulley mechanism. Then again, this was the best they could do without hardlight technology, and they wouldn't get it until... well, until long after he was an old man, once more unable to walk on his own.

"I remember HOW to do it, Lieutenant Vakarian, I just have problems with actually following through on the intention," Shepard retorted, holding on for dear life to the supports with his hands. His arm muscles returned to obedience a lot faster than the legs did.

"Where there's a will, there's a way. Attaboy!" Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Garry Vakarian continued, his smile slightly lopsided because of the scar tissue covering a significant portion of the right side of his face. Yet again, in all but race, he was the Garrus Vakarian that Shepard remembered - pragmatic and utilitarian in many respects, yet managing to be idealistic and supportive at the same time.

Shepard could not help but feel grateful to the man for his support - and his almost instant friendship. Having a genuinely friendly face - even if it was one he did not really know - helped his demeanour significantly. Finally, his legs gave up resisting and he felt the muscles tense at the insistence of his brain, one moving in front of another. He was still fuzzy on the passage of time, but it felt like it took him weeks to arrive at this point - he was finally making significant progress. He threw a quick glance over his shoulder to where Liara - _Lara_, he corrected himself - was standing. She smiled at him and noted something else on her datapad.

_The more things change, the more they stay the same, huh?_ he mused to himself as she adjusted the machine from its impossibly slow crawl to a more realistic walking pace forcing him to try and catch up.

* * *

Through these days he got to meet most of the other patients he shared a hallway with. On one side, he had only one neighbour - Vakarian - who he learned was an Army man, a sniper who landed here because he caught a rocket to his face - literally. A Taliban RPG shredded the helicopter his squad had been in, flying in for an SAR operation - at least, that was all the information that Lara was willing to give him. The other side of the hallway housed Lieutenant Commander Kaidan Alenko, recovering from severe head trauma that seemed to have impaired his spatial sense and left him with crippling intermittent migraines, and one Sergeant Rex Burton, whose problem, actually, wasn't in the huge gashes across his face (which he said he had gotten while wrestling a tiger to death in Pakistan), but in something classified.

This wing of the building housed only male patients, the women having a separate wing all to themselves, crossing paths only occasionally as the men passed through the women's wing on the way to the cafeteria - those of them who could make the journey, of course. Shepard was still stuck on the "re-learning how to digest food" stage, as holding down even the simplest of purees was still a challenge he dreaded repeating each time.

"Commander, the more you manage to hold down and digest, the faster your muscles will be able to grow back, keep that in mind," Lara insisted every time she saw him fighting the retching. Despite all the nurses coming and going through his room, doing whatever it is that nurses did - delivering medicines, changing his IV drips, doing injections, taking his temperature, changing the sheets, sponging him - they seldom said anything beyond the usual greetings and farewells, and that made him feel even more like an inanimate piece of meat on a slab. Thankfully, he finally managed to stand in the shower all on his own this morning, even though he still had to be put there by the hands of others. At least the more demeaning parts of his situation were starting to recede. It felt horribly wrong for a combat officer - and in this reality, however genuine or fake it may have been, he apparently still was one - to be treated like an invalid, incapable of doing anything for himself. It was soul-wrenchingly painful to admit that he **was** an invalid, and that only strengthened his resolve to get this sorted out as quickly as possible.

* * *

"I c-can't-" he hissed, stumbling on the treadmill, and hoping his arms could still hold him from collapsing onto it and being rolled off to further the humiliation. Even if only the doctor and the scar-faced sniper would see him, the shame he would feel would, first and foremost, be shame for himself and in front of himself. He wasn't making it up to his own standards. But he was going to change that.

"Alright, I think that's enough for today," Lara admitted, switching the machine off and helping Shepard ease himself into the wheelchair once more. "Good work, Commander, now let's get you back to your room for your scheduled massage. We want those muscles to grow, not fall off, now do we?" she added in a tone he never heard Liara use - one laced with (probably fake) sweetness, as one would talk when trying to coerce a child into eating his greens through promises of dessert. Oddly enough, it was working on him.

"So, I really have to ask," Vakarian spoke up, reminding Shepard of his presence, "Is your first name really "Commander" or there's something here I'm not getting?"

"The doctor here," Shepard nodded at Lara, who nodded at Garry who nodded at Shepard, making the latter feel like he was in some stupid theatrical performance and regretting he nodded to begin with, "The doctor thinks that my amnesia would be helped greatly if I remembered my name on my own. So yeah, I'm afraid for the time being, I might as well be C. Shepard."

"But imagine the satisfaction you will derive from managing it on your own!" Lara protested as she finished arranging Shepard in the chair and straightened up, running an absent-minded hand along her cre- _hair, dammit_- as she apparently often did, a sure sign that she started using product - either at all, or this particular brand - only recently and was still doubting whether it held her hair firmly enough. It always did, yet she checked it regularly enough to make Shepard's tracing of his facial scars look tame in comparison.

She still wouldn't allow him to look at them in a mirror, clearly she was trying to hold off his shock from the revelation for as long as possible - and it probably had more to do with the state his face was in rather than the scars on their own, he admitted to himself as she wheeled him out of the gym and into the hallway that ran in a circle around the central halls of the structure, uniting the medical, patient and administrative wings of the hospital's main building. He kept looking around, trying to seep in as many detail as was possible, noting how the hospital was arranged in a circular pattern, with the hallway they were in being the circle from which the five wings radiated outwards.

Seeing other people - real people, with names and lives and thoughts and words and faces he did not recognize, or at least did not think he recognized - affirmed his belief that this really could be the genuine reality and his memories of the Normandy and the N7 Commander Shepard a fantasy dream perpetuated by severe cranial trauma, probably working off some Freudian excuse in his past.

The only outstanding issue was that whenever he saw a face or head a name he recognized, they came bundled with details from the dream that were either accurate or dangerously close to reality. Alenko's migraines? Vakarian's and Burton's injuries? Sure, he may have overheard the doctors or nurses talking about them while he was comatose - but Burton was only moved to this hospital a few weeks ago, and certainly not way back when the N7 Commander became the First Human SPECTRE... That is, if his dream mapped accurately to real time, and was not, like some dreams can be, a life of its own compressed in a matter of minutes.

"Hey, doc?" he called out, turning his head to the left and upwards, almost to the straining point of his neck.

"Yes, Commander?" he heard her voice say from beyond his vision range.

"What's that pressure door? I've never seen one like that on any other patient's room."

"That's the entrance to a clean room, the patient... has extensive epidermal damage," she explained hesitantly. She obviously felt uncomfortable sharing patient details with him, but still did it - either out of a misguided attempt at coaxing his own memories out of him or something else, he did not know or begin to understand.

"Burns? Acid? If you don't mind me asking, of course."

"Burns, among other things. The girl's a mess, really. Poor Tali..."

"Tali?" he repeated, feeling his heart skip a beat. Another familiar- well name, at least, "That's a weird name."

"Short for Natalie. She says she hates her name but changing it was a hassle - and so she settled for Tali," Lara explained as they rounded a corner, entering the hallways of the men's wing. "Not that it matters now, seeing how she is reluctant to talk even to her doctors," she went on, rambling as she sometimes did, a trait for which Shepard was eternally grateful, "And I don't blame her. What she has to look forward to is rather grim - and I've seen her record photos. She used to be beautiful, before-"

She cut herself short, more because they reached their destination rather than because she caught herself saying too much. Shepard once again wondered how all of these breaches of patient confidentiality did not pile on to her, and then admitted that having a doctor - even a quirky rambling lesbian like Lara - capable of dealing not only with damaged soldiers, but also their internal struggles, was rare enough, especially among those who had security clearance. As Vakarian relayed to him, many patients here were not military, but intelligence, and that meant they could theoretically ramble, spill or otherwise divulge secrets of varying importance. That, in turn, meant that only a select few doctors and nurses could actually WORK in such a hospital... which also explained why the nurses weren't that talkative, as well as why Lara was more willing to talk to Shepard than to her colleagues.

After negotiating the door, she helped him offload himself onto fresh clean sheets of the bed and pushed the wheelchair into a corner.

"The way your eyes widened - you saw her in your dream, too?" she suddenly asked, looking up from reviewing her notes on the day's progress.

"Who?" Shepard asked, trying his best to fake disinterest.

"Natalie. Tali. You snapped at that name like a hungry alligator at a piece of meat," she replied with a wry smile, apparently enjoying the simile.

"Yes. Yes, she was in my dream."

"As was I?"

"And Alenko. Vakarian. Burton. That shrink you had me see yesterday - Chambers, she had a bit part too."

"So, what do you think? Did you really see them, and your mind somehow put all these people - most of which weren't even here when you were first admitted - into your dreams, or you associated something from your dream, or your hopes about it, with the people you've just met?" she went on, almost going out of breath again because she began speaking faster, as if deeply intrigued by the question.

"You're implying I'm trying to compensate for the lack of a memory of my past by filling it with whatever I can recall from my dreams and hooking it onto real people?" he responded, smiling weakly. "I wish that was the case. Oh, how I wish that was the case."


	4. Chapter 4 - Adaptation

**ADAPTATION**

The face that was staring at him from the mirror felt alien. Not in the sense of inhumanity, but in the sense that it was not his. Not really. Like it was someone else, some actor portraying him in a vid, miscast, with the wrong hair, scars that were slightly off and were probably moulded plastic or something to that effect, and cheeks that were too gaunt. Unfortunately, as he scowled at the train of thought, so did the reflection, reminding Shepard once again that, at least for the time being, this was his face. This was him, Commander Shepard, saviour of the galaxy, the Butcher of Torfan...

Ah, Torfan. Trudging through Batarian space was never a thing any Alliance soldier could enjoy, but Torfan burned brightly in Shepard's past - on many levels. It was his first severe wound, landing him in a hospital much like this one while his leg grew back all the bits that it had lost. It was his first major command. It was the operation that earned him his grisly nickname and the reputation that came with it, as well as all of its luggage, both good and bad. It was one of the main reasons he was picked to be a SPECTRE...

He absent-mindedly reached out to scratch the scarring on his left shin, where a Batarian frag grenade nearly cleaved his foot off. It was different in this... reality, on this body, but it was still there, it still itched and ached in the exact same way and it was still clearly a frag grenade wound. This, oddly, far more than the facial scarring, made him feel certain that even if this wasn't _his_ body, it was Shepard's. That is, of the Shepard of this world, whoever and wherever he was now. And that wasn't a particularly nice thought, because it left the window of opportunity that he WAS that Shepard wide open, possibly meaning that all that he remembered of being the other one, the warrior of the stars, was nothing but a half-remembered dream.

* * *

"Glad to see you up and about, Shepard," Vakarian called out from down the hall, seeing Shepard hobble along on his crutches. He could walk, sorta-kinda, on the treadmill now, and his muscles were still too weak, but as his restlessness was rather strong, he overpowered himself and opted for the crutches that Lara suggested (and which he initially turned down out of pride).

"Well, I can't exactly let something this ridiculous hold me down for long, can I?" Shepard replied, catching the vibe almost instantly. There was something about this... this man, that suddenly made each and every one of Shepard's worries to take a respectful step back in his presence. This made Vakarian's own presence in the hospital a bit of a conundrum. He was a bit _too_ cheerful for someone missing half his face and supposed to be suffering from survivor's guilt the size of Io at the least.

"Where're you headed?" the lieutenant asked as Shepard neared him and the two men shook hands. Shepard was at a loss as to which element of the human Vakarian was more startling - the exact same handshake (compensating for the difference in digits, of course) or the fact that what looked like a scratch on a turian face nearly devastated half of a human one. **_Rudimentary creatures of blood and flesh, groping in the dark-_**

He looked over his shoulder sharply, trying to drive Sovereign's voice from his head.

"You alright?" he heard Vakarian ask.

"Yeah. Yeah, I think so," he lied, turning back to face his friend's unscarred side as Garry turned to greet a passing doctor, apparently dropping an unasked follow-up question of what Shepard was looking at. PTSD was a common sight in the hospital, and compared to some of the people here, Shepard was a perfect picture of mental health.

"So, where're you going? You didn't answer."

"Weekly psych eval," Shepard replied with a grin and a jerk of his thumb indicating the direction he was supposed to take. "Either I'm doing badly, or that doctor Chambers has got the hots for me, because I think my sessions are longer than of the other guys,"

"Well, why can't it be both?" Garry asked with a shrug, before giving Shepard a careful pat on the right shoulder, "I mean, maybe she likes you and that's why she extends your sessions, to help you better?" he finished, cutting off Shepard's notion of a snappy retort as he realized the lieutenant wasn't making fun of him, but actually being serious about it.

"I hadn't actually considered that," Shepard conceded, "But I will be sure to ask her today, just in case."

"Remember, she's a doctor, it's a politeness situation - no picking your nose until after you've greeted her!" were the words that followed a grinning Shepard down the hallway.

* * *

"I'm going to be showing you a series of images. I want you to tell me the first word that comes to your mind," she said softly, as she always did when she was speaking to him, as if talking to someone with damaged hearing... or brain. He supposed the second was more likely, hence the subject matter - today the pictures mostly showed toys - or the fact that it was not an impossibility, considering some of the wounds he's seen the patients here get back up from.

Just the day before, his first day out around the building on his own, he saw a man with one of these in the mess hall. He had a glass eye and that was what initially attracted Shepard's attention - right after the bizarre unevenness of his face, which upon closer inspection turned out to be a graft of donor everything - muscle tissue, skin, even cheekbone. He had never realized what a traumatic experience Zaeed Messani apparently went through when Vido Santiago shot him in the face - in all senses of the word. He also didn't expect to actually **see** the mercenary (was he even one in this world?) here. This felt... wrong. Garru- Garry had a sense of_belonging_ here, so did Kaidan, and even Rex. Zaeed... not so much. He even had most of the same tattoos, except that the Blue Sun logo was replaced with a more cartoonish stylized sun emblem, so it was exceptionally bizarre to stare into that all-too-familiar face and see nothing but a blank unrecognizing stare looking back - the glass eye here was not a cybernetic implant, but an actual piece of _glass_. Shepard shuddered at the memory and returned to the here and now, looking at her - pretty much the same as he was used to, if a little less promiscuous in her doctor's frock and with shoulder-length hair.

"Doctor, if I may..." he said, raising his hand like a schoolboy (a good, endearing gesture, he recalled from his N7 training, often useful to get someone off-guard if you wanted to get a few blows in before the real shindig started), "I was wondering something and would like to ask for some pointers," he finished at least half as quietly as he began, as if he was bringing up something shameful.

Then again, last time, Kelly Chambers (M.D., Ph.D. and some sort of psychology wunderkind, judging by how the other doctors spoke of her) was asking him about his sexual preferences and whether he felt any undeserved or undue attraction to lieutenant Vakarian. His joke that he had none, but had plenty of due and deserved attraction to offer the lieutenant, either went over her head or was playing too much into her wishful thinking, because her laugh was anything but therapeutic. All of this made Shepard question the hospital's hiring policy even more.

"Sure, go ahead," she nodded, urging him to spit it out already with naught but a look and a wave of her hair, "There's nothing to be afraid of. Whatever happens in this room, stays in this room," she added in what she probably thought of as a reassuring tone.

_"I don't know what kind of shrink she is here, but so far, she feels as useless as the Kelly I used to know,"_ Shepard told himself bemusedly as he formulated his query.

"I've been wondering, what exactly is the profile of this institution?" he finally blurted, making an all-encompassing gesture on "this", as if trying to indicate the entire building while still being within it, "I mean, heal the sick, I got that, recovery for the wounded, and I'm sure Alenko and I qualify for that, but what about Burton? Vakarian? Messani? They look perfectly healthy," he went on, cursing inwardly for bringing Zaeed into this. He was getting too sentimental, as if dredging up memories of the Normandy would help cope with the fact that the people he fought and died side-by-side with for the last four years were right here, ALL AT ONCE, but didn't remember him at all.

"Well, I'm not sure if I'm allowed to tell you this," she began in the tone that implied _"but I will"_ as much as was humanly possible, "But Vakarian is going through a lot of stress, actually."

"Yeah, I was wondering about that. I mean, he wasn't alone in that helicopter, was he?"

"You know about his accident?" she asked with a surprised look... but not too surprised. Figured someone else would know that Lara is a blabbermouth.

"If you can call being shot down an "accident", then yeah, I know," Shepard admitted, shifting uneasily in his seat. This felt too much like interrogation, and he had no SPECTRE get-out-of-jail-free card to get him out of trouble this time around, even though he wasn't exactly sure what sort of trouble being ousted as a nosy snoop would entail in such a hospital.

"Well, imagine how would you feel if you saw your entire team get shredded to bits in front of your eyes," she retorted, leaning back in her chair with an air of smug superiority. She clearly expected this to get Shepard to back down.

"I don't have to, I've been there. More than once," he replied darkly, before adding to himself, _"Even if I'm not sure that it happened for real, my memories, my emotions on that matter ARE real. Torfan was real for me, Toombs and his story about Akuze was real, the Collector Ship was real, and all of that is more than enough."_

"So, you **do** remember something of yourself?" she perked up with interest, changing the subject seamlessly.

"Not a whole lot, and most of it has to do with people dying, I'm afraid," he said, covering the truth with a different truth, "It seems I've led a violent and bloody life," he added, trying to go for the sadness factor.

"Well, you seem to be coping with that fact pretty well," she noted, punctuating every word with a jab of her index finger in his general direction, as if counting the words off, "Although I have to admit, that so does Lieutenant Vakarian. And now, let's get back to our pictures, shall we?"

* * *

"So, how'd it go?"

"I'm not sure if she has the hots for me, or she has the hots in general and just turns them on whoever's closest," Shepard admitted, leaning against a wall to let his arms rest. These corridors were way too long for his liking.

"Well, if it makes you feel any better, the only emotion I seem to be getting out of her is pity, so you're better off than I am," Vakarian said comfortingly, "And for that there's usually only one cure. Shooting things."

"Sure, I'm always happy to blow something to bits, but unless you're hiding a sniper rifle under your bed, how do you get to shoot anything here?" Shepard asked, pushing himself away from the wall and lining up on the crutches for maximum (or the closest possible) comfort.

"Well, this is a predominantly military hospital. Tensions usually run high with former soldiers, and they need to let off steam... Long story short, there's this gun range..."

_"And that seals it. What kind of hospital __**is **__this?"_ was what Shepard thought, but what he actually said instead was "And you didn't tell me this before... why?"

"Um, no offense, Shepard, but are you sure you can even **hold** a gun in your current state of health, let alone shoot it?"

"Lead the way, Lieutenant. There's only one way to find out."


	5. Chapter 5 - Revelation

**REVELATION**

The gun range turned out to be a converted basement of one of the other buildings on the premises. The fact that the building in question was the morgue certainly felt like a weird combination, but it still drew a chuckle from Shepard as Vakarian helped him traverse the winding paths laid out between the trees and the bushes and the flowerbeds.

"I have to admit, this place is actually prettier on the outside. Indoors, I sometimes feel like I'm in a mental institution, not a _real_ hospital," he said to the sniper as they paused to let a wheelchair-bound man pass through. Looking at the scarred stumps of what used to be the man's legs, Shepard felt a sudden pang of guilt so common to people who could still walk upright, however badly, upon seeing a paraplegic or quadriplegic.

"Well, it _is_ in part a mental institution," Garry admitted, holding the morgue door open for Shepard to hobble through, "As a lot of us in here are here because our heads aren't screwed on straight."

"Yeah, tell me about it," Shepard nodded in agreement as they greeted the male nurse wheeling a gurney with what was obviously a body covered by a sheet on it past them, "I clearly remember I'm trained on how to use and service an M-4, how to strip it down for cleaning and reassemble it in the field, but for the life of me, I can't remember what it _looks like_," he stressed the last two words in what he hoped would feel like anguish. He hoped it was vague enough - weapon designations were not that different anywhere in the galaxy, and besides, he did know how to disassemble and reassemble the M-4 Predator by heart. If it existed here, he was half-certain an M-4 was something different. A shotgun, a grenade launcher, anything.

The descent down to the basement level went smoother than he'd expected - there was an elevator in the building, clearly intended for moving the bodies to the freezers below, but with the conversion to a classified-agent facility, the morgue apparently no longer needed that much freezers anymore.

"And we'll see what can be done about that, shall we?" Vakarian offered, opening the final door - admitting Shepard into the company of a tired-looking man dressed in combat fatigues, the first he'd seen wearing anything approaching a uniform in this place, slouched in a chair, and a well-built woman of about his crutch-limited height with her hair rolled up into a bun to apparently avoid getting it all over the place. The two were arguing and were not at all expecting anyone to walk in on them.

"...look, all I'm saying is, it's creepy enough that you're in the same building they store dead bodies in," the woman was protesting, "What you're suggesting is downright disgusting."

"Relax, Williams, it was only a joke!" the man replied, "Nobody's actually ever gonna let me use an actual dead body as a target, even if I really want to do that!"

"Hey, MacCarran, still don't know when to stop joking, eh?" Garry said as he shook hands with the man before turning his attention to the woman, "Ash, for what it's worth, it's really not worth the effort getting pissed at the guy, he's not here for his good sense of humour, y'know?"

"Sure, Vakarian, I'd like to see how _you_ feel when someone insults your faith and then tops it off with suggestions of abusing the dead," the woman replied, visibly relaxing nonetheless, "So, who's your friend?"

Finally managing to unfreeze himself, Shepard offered the surprisingly not-dead-herself Ashley Williams a hand to shake.

"I'm Commander Shepard, and I was told this is the place to go to in order to shoot some guns," he said by way of introductions, before turning to MacCarran, "Anything that goes "bang" and won't dislocate anything weakened by several years of coma would do at this point."

"Are you always that formal, or is Commander your first name?" Ashley asked, folding her arms across her chest. She was a lot less respectful than the Gunnery Chief Williams that died on Virmire - then again, she didn't know him from Saren, and he most certainly wasn't in uniform, so her sass wasn't entirely unjustified. And, given the time differential, it was more than probable she wasn't a Gunnery Chief now, if she ever was one. Can't have the Williams curse ruin your family if you didn't have a grandfather giving up a colony to the turians, now can you?

"Retrograde amnesia," he replied, jabbing himself into his left temple with a fingertip, "The doctors insist that telling me my full name would somehow ruin the recovery process."

"That oughta suck," the quartermaster piped in, getting up from his chair and fiddling with the brim of his baseball cap (bearing a stylized target on it - _real subtle_, Shepard thought) as if he had something else to say to Williams but couldn't spit it out in front of the two other men. "So, something with a smaller kick, huh?"

Having asked that, he moved towards a closed door without so much as waiting on an answer - Shepard belatedly realized that his words probably fell under the clause of "thinking out loud". The door, apparently leading to the actual range, yielded to MacCarran's second attempt at unlocking it, and admitted all four of them, one-by-one, Shepard being the last, into the darkened space of what obviously used to be a place for storing dead bodies - the outlines of the removed freezers could still be clearly made out on the floor and ceiling.

As the lights flickered into existance on the ceiling, Shepard quietly watched the others. MacCarran was busy unlocking the gun lockers - aparently he didn't bother to do it unless he had someone to use them walking in, like he did now. Vakarian was already sizing up rifles in one of the lockers - he really wasn't all that different from the Garrus that Shepard remembered. Williams... now her, he did not expect. This was the first major deviation from what he was used to. She was quietly staring into the "distance" of the actual range, resting her palms against the counter of one of the firing lanes.

"It's "Major", Commander," she said without turning to face him, "And I'd suggest you watch where you point those eyes," she added before finally turning, leaning against a separator between the booths. Shepard, who by that point had already gone from looking at her to looking at the targets, raised a quizzical eyebrow.

"I have no idea what you mean, Major Williams," he replied earnestly - having an inkling was not the same, after all - and tried to change the subject, "So, what's your damage? You don't look like a psych patient, and bear no discernible wounds. How'd you end up in this place?"

"Ah, the _second_ most popular question," she smiled as she underlined the word "second", "Radiation poisoning, something unusual or so they tell me. So I'm stuck here despite being combat-ready, and it's driving me _nuts_."

"Radiation and combat-ready don't go hand-in-hand, Williams," Garry proposed, hoisting a sleek-looking compact rifle out of the locker, one that looked like it could be easily broken down and stuffed into a carrying case, maybe one that didn't actually look like it had a gun in it. Shepard, who was more used to guns that folded down into becoming their own carrying cases, admitted to himself that he did not know how he arrived at that train of thought. He'd've dwelled on it more, but he was snapped out of his reverie by MacCarran's voice.

"Alright, Shepard, let's try you out with this one. Protective glasses and earmuffs are over there, I'm putting the gun in a booth while I go get you some ammo, a'ight?"

And again, he moved without waiting on an answer. Shepard hobbled over to what apparently had been designated as his booth, and picked up the unloaded gun. The shape was unmistakeable, and the principle of operation apparently remained the same across the centuries - put your hand on the grip, your index finger on the trigger, aim down the iron sights or whatever doohickey you may have strapped onto the gun in their stead, and you were ready to shoot things.

A pair of plastic glasses and a pair of earmuffs found their way onto his counter. He looked up to see Williams staring back at him.

"Don't tell me you've forgotten even the basic firing range safety rules, _Commander_."

"No worries there, Major, I was just trying to get myself to admit that I don't actually remember guns. Not their names, not what they look like. I recall how to use one, how to hold it, how to aim and shoot, how to lead the target and how to kill or disable a person if need be. But this?" he held up the gun in his hand, "This is somehow gone."

"Wait, does that even happen outside of movies?" she asked skeptically, folding her arms across her chest once again, "How do you remember how to shoot a gun without remembering what one looks like?"

"Motor memory," Shepard replied without missing a beat, "The body remembers what motions to make, and for that, it doesn't need to remember what it is motioning with."

He smiled inwardly. Concealing his ineptitude with modern-day weapons would not be problematic now, as the only thing left unaccounted for was how these weapons recoil and kick back - and that had more to do with the issue of trying not to hit yourself on the face with the gun you were firing.

He put on the glasses and put the earmuffs around his neck for ease of placement on the ears and turned back just in time to see MacCarran emerge with several clips of what appeared to be crude projectile ammunition.

_"Even the Batarians have better weapons,"_ he fumed to himself, accepting them and putting them carefully down onto the counter, side-by-side. And froze stiff.

"Something wrong?" Vakarian asked, noticing the motionlessness - MacCarran was gone again, apparently returned to the admittance room.

"Garry..." Shepard began, fighting down the urge to say "Garrus", "Have you ever seen this symbol before?" he asked, holding up one of the clips to the light so that Garry could see the manufacturer's logo, a vertically elongated hexagon with a split in the lowest angle, appearing as if cradled in a pair of stylized hands - in actuality, two lines that ran parallel the edges of two sides of the hexagon each, arranged symmetrically around it._Cerberus_.

"Sure. Haven't you? It's all over the place. Stationery, report forms, all the paperwork. Heck, there's a giant one right above the entrance to the hospital. It's the sign of the CIA branch that runs and maintains this place, apparently."


	6. Chapter 6 - Acclimatisation

**ACCLIMATISATION**

Despite the shock, he still managed to compose himself. It felt a little awkward, shooting while sitting on a chair, but MacCarran insisted that he should do it sitting down instead of standing up - all in all, if he needed crutches to walk, letting him shoot while standing was more than simply reckless. Williams and Vakarian watched the process from a moderately safe distance, as if expecting the .22 gun to blow up in Shepard's hand, and Ashley even let out what was clearly a sound of surprise (though regulations wouldn't've called it that) when Shepard's first shot hit the target square in the head.

"Alright, that went better than expected," MacCarran said, voicing everyone's opinion, "But can you make that stick?"

Shepard smiled inwardly. The kick was a lot less than he expected, this really was a "light" gun. The sights were zeroed in, and he still remembered how to use them. His arms, weak as they were, still obeyed his will, and from that fact he drew immense satisfaction. There is no greater pleasure for someone who has taken their body for granted for the longest of times than to realize that it, once more, does what it is told to do. He carefully took aim and squeezed off three shots in rapid succession, all landing rather close on the silhouette's neck.

"And that's all she wrote for that one," Vakarian drawled cheerfully, earning himself a reproachful look from both MacCarran and Williams. "Aw, come on, four shots, all of them potentially lethal, put all of that into a real person, and he's talking to St. Paul real soon."

Shepard turned out from his seat, remembering to put the gun down on the shelf first, and pulled one part of his earmuffs aside.

"St. Paul?"

* * *

"I can't believe you don't remember anything about Christianity," Alenko said amusedly as he prodded whatever it was on his plate with his fork. "That's not something you can _not_ learn in this part of the world, you know?"

"Come on, give the guy a break. I bet there's a lot he won't be able to remember," Ashley protested. She somehow managed to settle down with them at the canteen, although after the tour de force she demonstrated the firing range, nobody wanted to protest. Alenko just got out of a doctor's office and neighbourly etiquette dictated that Shepard and Vakarian take him up as well.

"Sure. But he remembers how to handle a gun, that's valuable," Vakarian added, putting a friendly arm on Shepard's shoulder, "I mean, even if he won't remember everything, he'll be able to serve again, that's good, right?"

"Guys. While I appreciate the sentiment and concern, please stop talking as if I'm not here, alright?" Shepard interjected, combating his mashed potatoes. The potatoes valiantly resisted all attempts to be picked up, sliding, seeping and probably teleporting off his fork the moment he tried to lift it up.

"Wait, who said that? There's someone else but us three at this table?" Kaidan announced in fake shock, groping around like a blind man - or someone trying to catch a ghost.

"Oh no, we must've picked a haunted table!" Ashley played along, swinging her arms as well - at least until she connected with Shepard's elbow as he was desperately trying to get at least some of those mashed potatoes all the way from his plate to his mouth. The fork, liberated by the force of the impact, promptly declared independence, established itself as a constitutional monarchy and went about the business of picking out a national anthem while the mashed potatoes arced gracelessly off it once more and onto the shoes of one Dr. Lara Tasoni, M.D., Ph.D., et al.

"Nice to see you all in such a good mood," she said by way of greeting, trying her best not to laugh at Shepard's sullen expression as he collected his fork off the floor behind her. Her gaze followed him as he returned to his seat, contemplating the level of sterilization the fork would need to be food-safe again and which he could actually achieve with the tools at hand, before settling for wiping it with a napkin and returning to his battle with the potatoes. It produced such an effect that nobody at the table even noticed her flicking the offending potatoes off her shoes and under their table with what was clearly a well-practiced and fluid motion.

"Shepard, if you're so intent on trying to eat those potatoes, get a spoon, it'll save you a few years of your life," Alenko suggested quietly, "Though I must warn you - as with all hospital food, their edibility is highly suspect."

"I assure you, the food is perfectly palatable and is tailored to your individual medical needs," the doctor chimed in, reminding those seated at the table of her presence, "I've also been told that you went to the gun range today, Commander, without first consulting me."

"I'm sorry, was I supposed to?" Shepard asked concernedly, mixing a genuine guilt with an equally genuine admission of intent in his tone. The end result wasn't in any way graceful and sounded bratty at best.

"Yes, you were. As your doctor, I'm personally responsible for your well-being, and that includes knowing and influencing your day-to-day activities!"

She was on a roll - though the emotion behind it was clearly genuine, the entire speech felt a little too well-rehearsed for such a specific transgression, as if she was preparing for such an occasion particularly because of what she expected from Shepard, or maybe because he wasn't the first of her patients to do something like that without asking her first. Wasn't hard to imagine why - she didn't quite project the image of the homeroom teacher you should ask permission before doing something dangerous and stupid, like walking out into the street out of the first-floor classroom window.

"I'm sorry, doctor, but it did work out fine, didn't it?" Shepard offered, looking up from his plate once more, thinking he will never get to eat today, "Plus, it's not like I was unattended - Vakarian was there to help me get there, and Williams here and Mr. MacCarran the Quartermaster were there to watch me in case I spontaneously combust because I touched a gun," he finished, delivering the last bit with a smirk that made his facial scars itch and finally consuming the accursed potatoes with the spoon Alenko handed him from the tray.

"You'd better be careful with that mouth, Commander," the doctor retorted, pointing at him with an accusing finger, "Let it run that fast and you actually **might** spontaneously combust," she added, before turning her attention to the others, "How are you today, Major Alenko? Nothing troubling you? Got your shots?"

"Everything's ok, ma'am, and the shots were scheduled for tomorrow, last I checked," Kaidan replied between sips of whatever it was they poured in the glasses here. Sure, it was sorta pink and was labeled as "lemonade" (_"Has anyone ever heard of pink lemonade?")_ but the taste was more reminiscent of the kind of chewy marmalades everyone probably had tried at some point in their childhood that could give a dentist heartburn just from looking at them.

"Oh, right," she said, tapping something on her datapad, "Sorry. Lieutenant Williams, you have an examination in thirty minutes," she went on, as if trying to justify her continued presence at the table by any means necessary. Shepard wolfed down his steak-substitute (it had grown cold during his struggle with the potatoes) and was debating with himself over the sensibility of hazarding a drink of this "lemonade" to wash it all down when he discovered a legitimate reason to interrupt Lara's train of thought.

"Doctor, sorry, but what is **that**?" he asked motioning for her (and, by proxy, everyone else at the table) to look in the same direction he was looking, where an orderly was wheeling a weird-looking cart out of the kitchen. It looked like something designed to go into outer space, all sleek and obviously airtight.

"Ah, that's the delivery system for the clean room," Lara replied matter-of-factly, turning back to her datapad, "You know, because Natalie has to eat _something_ and she clearly cannot do it in _this place_, because it's not sterilized **enough**."

"Yeah, I was wondering about that, actually," Vakarian chimed in, "I mean, why does she still stay in the clean room? Far as I can tell, her burns have all healed a long while ago."

"What makes you think that?" the doctor asked, cocking her head quizzically.

"The bandaging. Y'know, for those rare cases she steps outside? It's not done in a way you do to relieve pressure on blisters, and it's not done in a way you do to soak up blood. It's done in a way to cover up deformity while making as much allowance for mobility as possible," he explained in a patient and measured tone, "If you were to ask me, I'd actually say she's trying to work out in there. _Somewhere_."

"Brilliant deduction skills, Sherlock," Ashley remarked, playfully nudging Garry in the shoulder with a balled fist, "But how do you come to all these conclusions? Where's the evidence?"

"It's rather simple, actually. I pay attention. First up, she's walking normally, not as if she's in any pain from it. Second, the clothes? They fit snugly, if there were actual burns under there, she'd have to have to be on some kickass painkillers to take that kind of abuse from herself, and kickass painkillers seldom let you walk in a straight line."

He paused to take a breath and that generated an awkward silence during which they all watched the orderly move out of sight down a hallway towards a pressure door that was already becoming familiar to Shepard.

"Third, I've seen a lot of bandaging, what with these and all," he said, tapping the scarred side of his face, "And lately it's more obvious she's been bandaging herself, without a nurse to help her - that indicates no real need for the bandages other than concealment of her appearance."

"Bravo," Shepard finally said to fill the void that seemed to have taken hold of the table as Garry wrapped up his little Revelation Speech, "Which leaves us with only one question, Vakarian - you know all this because you watch her _how_ diligently?"

He was thankful to see Garry almost-blush and shift uneasily in his seat.

"Well... I'm a recon ops specialist. It's what I do, take assessment and draw conclusions," he finally proposed in a tone that didn't really sound accepting of objections, "Plus, come on, even with the allowance for the bandages - have you seen those hips?"

"Pah, men," Ashley exclaimed, throwing a glance at Lara, as if expecting some sympathy or sisterly feminine support.

"I don't know, Lieutenant Williams, I think he made a valid point," the doctor said, "Those are rather fine hips she has there, and to keep that shape on hospital food, she had to have done exercise. Good catch, Lieutenant Vakarian," she finished with a nod to Garry - who returned it in kind - before turning on her heels and continuing, "And now, if you'll excuse me, I must be off. The paperwork beckons."

"So, we got it about Vakarian, in an unexpectedly stalkerish way, so what about you, Shepard?" Kaidan asked as the doctor left, "Who's your supposed ideal companon?"

"I don't actually know, Kaidan," Shepard replied, "Though I always imagined it's be someone in a short skirt and a looong jacket," he replied, drawing out the "o" in long because of a stifled yawn that usually signified the presence of a satisfied digestive system inside of him.

"Oh, like in the song?" Ashley asked cheerfully.

"What song?"


	7. Chapter 7 - Militarisation

**MILITARISATION**

"I feel like there's something about this place," Shepard said, leaning carefully against the park bench, hoping that the paint looked fresh not because it WAS fresh, but because it simply was brightly lit by the noon sun, "Something that's hidden, something that I'm staring at, straight in the face, but constantly overlooking, you know?"

"And it's not the ubiquitous logo?" Kaidan ventured warily, turning away from the sun, which he had been enjoying prior to Shepard's question, and towards the scarred man which he, apparently, finally conceded to accepting as a friend. It wasn't an easy courtship - as Vakarian insisted on calling it - mainly because L2 Biotic Migraine Kaidan was a lot friendlier than Concussed Head Migraine Kaidan, and a lot less paranoid. Although, once you've got him to open up a bit - which may or may not have involved some awkward almost-flirting - he was pretty much the same Kaidan, except maybe a little less in control of his temper.

"No. It's the building. Even discounting the odd shape," Shepard replied, pausing as the realization hit him. _"It's the Citadel. The gorram thing is shaped like the Citadel. Why didn't I see it before?"_

"The... building? This building?" Kaidan asked amusedly, turning on the bench to stare at the hospital entrance. The entrance didn't stare back, probably because it knew that it was rude to stare.

"Yes. Look at it. I mean, look at it like a military man," Shepard pressed on, also turning, and using his index finger to articulate his point, "See the windows? The entrance? The lawns? Nothing bothering you about them?"

"Other than the bizarre doors and lack of wheelchair access, nothi-" Kaidan paused, his eyes widening with realization, "Wait a second. This is a killzone. This entire courtyard is a killzone," he slowly said, speeding up as his train of thoughts accelerated, spurred into action by the associative memory kicking in, "Normal hospital courtyards are a breeze to have a firefight in because you have lots of cover - benches, fountains, signposts, even trash containers. Here, everything is either at a right angle to the potential firing positions for the defenders or up against a building's wall..."

"And the firing positions? Heavy entrance doors to provide cover for the defenders and complicate forced entry, the first floor windows are all far off the ground with next to no windowsills - makes for difficult entry **_and_** a good elevated firing position," Shepard prompted, "So unless explosives come into the mix, this is an easily defendable fortress that can't really be blindsided because there are windows everywhere facing outwards, and the bare lawns separate the trees from the buildings from all sides."

"Shepard. Alenko. What're you up to?" boomed a familiar - although decidedly weird now that it didn't have that reptilian edge to it - voice from a scarred face.

"Rex. Come here, we're playing wargames," Shepard said to the bulky man, realizing for the first time that he looked familiar as a human not because of the scars, but because of the musculature - Vega looked sort of the same. Vega pretty much **was** a human Krogan.

"Wargames? I don't see no toy soldiers," Burton chuckled, taking up what little space the bench had to offer.

"Not that kind, Rex. The mental kind. Wanna play Red Team Leader for us?" Kaidan offered, before explaining, "Say, you have a team of ten, yourself included. Full tac gear, but what you carry is what you have, so no rocket launchers or riot gear unless you feel like carrying them in on your own humps. You are coming from the gate," he gestured in the general direction of _over there_, indicating a far-off break in the trees that surrounded this place that may or may not have been the main gate.

"You have to take the main hospital building. Inside, for interests of fairness, are also ten individuals," Shepard caught on, chastising himself for using the future-PC version of "people" or "men" to denote not-necessarily-military sentients, "They are expendable for your purposes, and therefore will oppose you. They are forewarned you are coming, but have nothing to entrench with other than what is at their disposal in the hospital, and their entire arsenal is what they could liberate from the firing range."

"Hmm. So we have armor and radios, which they don't,-" Rex began thoughtfully.

"-but they have the building, which you don't," Kaidan finished for him.

"Hmm. Gotta think a bit on this," Rex replied, getting back up and walking down the pathway towards the main gate, taking occasional glances to the left and right, apparently considering angles of approach, as every time he took a look, he made some sort of angular chopping motion with his hand. Watching the large figure talk to himself like that was... unusual. Rex apparently either kept to himself **or** was entertaining a crowd with one tale or another from his past - usually involving some new outlandish version of where he got his impressive facial slashes.

"This should be interesting," Shepard said, "He doesn't look like someone who plans with a strategic view, plotting out from the end result out towards the beginning, does he?"

"No, he does not. More like the always-ready sergeant, trying to keep his troops alive while doing the most damage to the enemy possible."

"Hah, knew a guy like that once," Shepard began before realizing just _what_ he said, but the cat was out of the bag, "Though his preferred tactic was to charge at the enemy. With his size, you'd think he'd be a bullet sponge, but no, it actually scared the OpFor bad enough that they stood, slack-jawed, staring at the inbound muscle train, eating shotgun slugs and kicks to the head."

"_Knew a guy_?" Kaidan asked pointedly with a bemused expression of _Caught you red-handed, you scoundrel!_

"Hmm. Associative memory, interesting," Shepard replied as innocently as he could. Getting carried away was careless, this was not _his_ Kaidan, however much he might be like him. Not the one he could trust with his life... Oh, alright, he probably could trust this one as well, but for the interest of short-term survival, he **had** to keep up the pretense of being amnesiac for as long as possible, as it kept him from being asked too many questions that may have lead him to being uncovered as not being _that_ Shepard. The one who arrived with an electrocuted brain. Or, what's worse, they'll decide that he _is_ that Shepard and his mind simply broke from the damage, and ship him off to some psychiatric facility - that would certainly put a stop to his pipe dream about ever returning to the Normandy.

"Well, keep it up then, you might remember more stuff," Kaidan replied after a modest pause, shrugging dismissively and gesturing at the inbound figure, "Looks like Rex made his mind up."

"Can I use mortars?" was the first thing he asked once he got close enough to talk comfortably.

"So long as you'd be willing to haul them all the way from your LZ," Shepard replied with a grin, "Or sight them in from there, of course, that's also an option."

"Alright. One mortar, underslung grenade launchers for the rest of the team," Rex started, obviously thinking aloud, "Move in single file, trying to keep as low a profile against the hospital windows as possible," he gestured at the lawn, "Split here, and then here, making three three-man teams - one's left behind manning the mortar," he went on, as if reading a lecture to an audience, "Make like the langouste, use the splitstream."

"Sorry, what?" Kaidan asked with a pained expression, "Like the what?"

"Langouste. Rock lobster. Whatever. Big carapaced thing that lives in the seas," Rex tried to explain with a chuckle, "Walks on the ocean floor, keeping against the currents by utilizing the slipstream - first guy acts as wavebreaker, so he's the only one actually being pushed at by the incoming current, everyone walking behind him is in his slipstream, safe and not being washed away," he went on, trying to use gestures to make his point, but coming off as if he was trying to demonstrate the merits of beheading a chicken before plucking it, "And once he's tired, they're switch places. Cyclists also do that, you know, and birds fly in formation for the same reason. Same thing applies to soldiers, except the stream you're slicing is gunfire - the first guy normally would have a riot shield, or something to replace it, but since you said no heavy stuff, well, he'd have to tough it out."

"Okay, he totally sounds like that guy you described just now," Kaidan said slowly, blinking almost as loudly as he was thinking, trying to process the datadump.

"Alright, Rex, and then what?" Shepard asked, deflecting the issue. It was bad he had one person already capable suspecting he was faking amnesia.

"Guide the mortar to the front entrance, shell the heck out of those barriers," Rex bit the bait, indicating the building as he explained, "Use rifle fire to tear down the windows if the defenders hadn't started taking potshots at us yet, then drop grenades into them as soon as possible and hope it gives us enough cover and chaos to make a run for the entrance," he paused, mulling things over. "No, scratch that, one three-man team knocks down_that_ power line to kick down the fence with it, and uses it as cover at least partway to the building. Divides the attention of the attackers **and** deprives the building of electricity."

"Good idea, Rex, but most hospitals have backup generators," Shepard countered.

"Not of this magnitude. Look at the number of lines running into the premises - you could feed a whole city block with that much juice. Kicking it down **will** hurt the hospital."

"Solid plan there, Burton," a new voice said, joining the discussion. "Are we playing "let's blow the hospital up" again?"

"Not quite, Vakarian, we're playing "Defend the fortress"," Shepard explained, turning to the newcomer, "Kaidan and I are plotting for the Blue Team - defending the hospital - and Rex here is trying his best to do Red Team proud. He's winning so far," he added morosely.

"Is he now? Did he notice you posted sharpshooters on the roof?" Garry asked, indicating upwards with a jut of his chin, and, after everyone looked at the roof of the building, went on, "See those decorative things on the front?"

"Hah, kinda like the Kremlin wall there, I think," Rex remarked thoughtfully, "See those teeth-like things? Very familiar, very unsettling."

"Yeah, they also would make excellent cover for a shooter whose targets are below him," Shepard nodded, "See? He has a comfortable base to rest his rifle against, and they're not very likely to hit him if they shoot back with anything of insufficiently large caliber. Or a rocket lau-"

"A-ha, so, amendment to plan: grenades onto the roof balcony," Rex interrupted, getting into gear again, "THEN proceed inside and-"

In the huddle of the crowd, nobody noticed a black SUV approach the hospital from the direction of the main gate until it already stopped at the entrance, disgorging two people out of its Cerberus-emblazoned doors. A man and a woman. The man, wearing a black suit and Cerberus-orange tie, was dark-skinned, with closely-cropped hair and a walk that indicated military history. The woman, in her black and white dress (with what seemed like a Cerberus-logo stamped brooch pinned to her chest) with her rather pale skin and black hair, looked like a monochrome photo and walked like someone who just stepped out of a porn vid. Needless to say, the eyes of all the men that have been plotting warfare moments earlier, were glued to her almost instantly the moment she stepped out.

"Who're those?" Shepard asked, "Hospital administration?" he ventured, already dreading the fact that he had a pretty good guess _who_ they were, if not _what_ they were doing here. As the others considered their answers, the mysterious arrivals walked into the building, paying no attention whatsoever to the conspirators watching them.

"No idea, but that's not the first time they came in, Shepard," Garry asnswered, "And judging by the fact that the last two times, they checked in on **you**, I'm thinking that that's your short skirt right there."


	8. Chapter 8 - Discussion

**DISCUSSION**

"So, Commander, how goes your recovery?" Miranda Lawson, CIA Special Agent (at least her badge said so), asked, leaning against the table. Shepard was certain her dress violated a few laws of gravity - which, in a world without nanofibers, element zero and kinetic barriers felt just a little bit implausible - and all that was done with the express purpose of attracting as much attention to her cleavage as humanly possible without actually exposing much naked flesh to the casual observer. "We've been told you're exceeding expectations."

"That depends on what sorts of expectations you had, I suppose," Shepard deflected, "After all, half a year ago, you probably still doubted whether I would ever wake up."

"Says here you're showing excellent results on the firing range," Jacob Taylor, NSA Specialist (again, at least according to the badge - the Cerberus tie made that highly questionable), stated, more for the air in the room rather than anyone in particular, "Not so well on the physical recovery front, I see."

He looked up from Shepard's file onto the man himself. Shepard bitterly noted that the file Jacob was holding didn't have his first name either - the only thing he genuinely could not remember despite the best of tries. He somehow felt that if he got it back - got his name back - he would understand what he is doing here, and how he can get back to the Normandy, if that was at all possible.

"Not enough time yet. Shooting is a motor skill - soon as I could hold a gun steady, I had to try if I could aim it. I can," Shepard explained calmly, watching their reactions, trying to remember who they were in _his _world, and who they could be here. _"Jacob's former special ops, idealist, thinks he's doing the world a favour, working for Cerberus. Miranda's a yes-girl, jumping at every opportunity to distance herself from her father, secure her position as a valuable operative. I wonder if that holds true here as well..."_

"Yeah, it's like riding a bike, you never forget it," Jacob admitted with a half-smile. The soldier in him evidently still outweighed the intelligence officer, and Miranda didn't approve, judging by the complicated motion her upper lip went through at the sound of that. _"Right, they used to date, at least the ones I know used to. Hmmm..."_

"We've also gotten reports from the doctors that you have started to remember bits of your past life, is that correct?" Miranda asked after a slight awkward pause.

"Yeah, though not a lot," Shepard said, "Some bits of people I used to serve with, some of the battles I've been in," he added, trying to keep it as vague as possible, "Some of the wounds I've gotten, too," he added, rubbing his grenade-scarred leg.

"But not, say, important government secrets?" Miranda asked conversationally, as one would normally inquire about the weather the day before.

"Did I even have access to those?" Shepard asked earnestly, cocking an eyebrow at the question.

"Aaand that's an answer in itself, of sorts," she said more to herself than to anyone else, noting something down in the file. Shepard, in turn, noted to himself that she was more keen on writing things on paper, wherein the impression he got from the technology of this era of that being a sign of the past, with the future being in digital interaction, digital storage, computerized systems, maybe artificial intelligences... And two steps away from that, you have **"Does this unit have a soul?"**

"So, to what do I owe the honor of this visit, anyway?" Shepard asked, looking over them both, clasping his hands together on the table in front of him. The examination room the hospital staff emptied for them to hold the interview in was a lot less suitable for the purpose than the hospital's lounges, but it was also a lot more private... despite feeling quite the opposite, their voices resonating with a slight echo in the tile-and-laminate chamber of the room.

"We needed to ascertain your progress, see how soon you can get back into the field," Jacob answered earnestly, with a slight nod of his head that Shepard took to indicate that he had an optimistic outlook on the situation.

"And also to see how your brain was functioning," Miranda added, finally tearing her eyes away from the file, "And now that we have, we can bring in a different specialist to help you deal with the situation at hand - amnesia."

"**Another** doctor? Don't they have doctors here?" Shepard asked with an air of light-hearted suspicion - the kind one uses to say _"so you __**don't**__ know who ate all the cookies?"_

"Not of that grade," Miranda replied condescendingly, "the doctors here are mostly for getting people out of the grave, whereas getting them back into the field is a separate matter entirely."

"So you're giving me the fast-track, huh?" Shepard grinned, leaning back in his chair.

"What makes you say that?" Jacob asked, leaning forward in what seemed like an instinctive attempt to close the widening distance between himself and Shepard.

"Well, I've seen some of the people in here - far healthier than me - who are still stuck here, because there are apparently still tests to be ran on them," Shepard explained, trying to restrain himself from naming any names. He shouldn't give them any more cards than there already were on the table, at least not yet, not until he was sure what cards they held.

"Perhaps because there are. This hospital deals with all sorts of ailments, some of which might not even _have_ cures yet," Miranda conceded, "Experimental bioweapons, unknown bullet alloys, poisons... Or unexpected medical conditions, ones people don't usually survive or wake up from a coma after having - like you and your electrocution, for example," she went on, indicating Shepard with her index finger in a surprisingly not-at-all serious way.

"In case you were wondering, some associations can bring back memories," Shepard said after a slightly awkward pause, "For example, I've recently remembered a man I served with simply because another patient looks like him. I'm sure I would remember more if I knew my first name. You know it, right?"

He hoped he'd come off desperate enough to make what he had planned next believable. The problem with faking amnesia was that he couldn't readily use his pre-existing knowledge of all these people without giving himself away... "Readily" being the operative word. So he intended to change that.

"Yes, we know it," Jacob admitted.

"But we are under orders not to reveal it to you without a doctor's conclusion that you are ready. There is belief that this may trigger an unfortunate and unpredictable reaction on your part."

_"Sure, the big being that you work for Cerberus and don't really hide it all that well, and I apparently wasn't a big friend of Cerberus in this world either. Admit it, that's why you're looking at me like that."_

"You see, Miss Lawson- Would you, by any chance, be related to a Henry Lawson, the industrialist?" he asked as nonchalantly as possible, congratulating himself on using a timeless "industrialist" instead of, say, "entrepreneur" or, what's worse, "despotic corporate head".

"None," Miranda replied without batting an eye, "It's not that rare a name, you know."

"Right. But Oriana is, on the contrary. Do you know anyone called Oriana?" Shepard pressed on, well aware of the risk he was running. This was old Miranda, Cerberus Cheerleader, who would kill, deceive and probably erase from existence for her sister, and do it with as little help as possible. In other words, all the things that got her into this job in the first place.

"N-no. Doesn't ring any bells either," Miranda protested, although it was easily noticeable even to the untrained eye that she became a few shades paler, quite the achievement considering her already rather fair skin.

"Oh well, maybe it's my mind playing tricks on me again. What about you, Mr. Taylor? Any relation to a Captain Ronald Taylor? Bearded guy, real authority type," Shepard went on, without missing a beat. He had to rattle their cage, because it was obvious they **needed** him, and that meant he could get away with certain... liberties.

"That is my father's name, but he was never a captain of anything, and never had that much of a beard, I'm afraid," Jacob replied, not as visibly shaken as Miranda, more like surprised at the mention of his father.

"Hmm. Maybe the doc was right about the hallucinations," Shepard added thoughtfully, finishing his one-man play.

"Hallucinations?" Miranda asked, the concern in her voice palpable - though obviously it had more to do with the investment Cerberus must've made in his recovery than any actual concern for his person.

"Well, it's too strong a word, but apparently, while I was **out**, I was dreaming the whole time, and the doc's afraid that my dreams have been bleeding into my new memories, making me feel like I'm remembering something real, whereas I'm actually recalling the dream," he explained, hoping that concept would hold water if necessary. After all, he did plant the necessary seeds before doing this.

"Dr. Tasoni doesn't mention this anywhere in her reports," Jacob said, flipping through the pages, "I wonder why."

_"As do I. This is getting interesting, she was keeping that fact to herself - why? Cui prodest?"_ Shepard said to himself, resisting the urge to grin widely.

"In any case, if you've nothing else to ask of me, I'm afraid I have to be off," he said out loud instead, "I've got an appointment with a new doctor in half an hour, and I've never been to that part of the building. I'm afraid of getting lost."

"I guess we're done here, for now at least," Miranda accepted, getting up, her dress seemingly crackling under the stress of containing her well-toned body. The effect wasn't as prominent as it was in the catsuit he was more used to seeing her in, but still, Shepard had to admit - she knew that what she had was worth flaunting, and she did it with great skill.

"Alright, let's get going then," Jacob said, more in a rhetoric sense than as any actual order to Miranda - it was evident that in this universe he was more of a do-er than an order-er, and so she was the one calling the shots here.

"Go on ahead, get the car running, I have to visit the ladies' room," she replied, gathering up the file from the table. Jacob nodded and walked out, whistling some tune to himself as he went.

"I can help you find it if you need assistan-" Shepard began before being cut off due to an unexpected shortness of breath, perpetuated by an elbow jammed into his throat, pinning him against a wall. Normally, he'd get offended at it, but here was a CIA agent - something he assumed to be the local equivalent of a SPECTRE, judging by how everyone gave her a wide berth despite her appearance - and he was still a frail weak hospital patient.

"Now tell me, and be quick about it," she hissed through gritted teeth, casting a careful glance at the door to check whether Jacob came back to investigate the noises, "How do you know about Oriana? What else do you know?"


	9. Chapter 9 - Consultation

**CONSULTATION**

"N-not much," Shepard wheezed, "And I'd tell more easily if you'd just-"

She understood it before he managed to force the last words out of himself. He was let down almost instantly, coughing from the stress put on his throat and bending over.

"Alright," he resumed, straightening up, "I don't know much, or maybe I don't remember much, but know this - the guy you put in charge of protecting your sister-" he almost smiled at the sight of her recoiling in reaction to the word "sister", "-Niket, or Neket, or whatever he's spelled, he's going to betray you."

"It's Nikita, and I severely doubt it. He has helped me protect her thus far," Miranda retorted with a disgusted look on her face, "Is that all you got?"

"Ah, but he helped you because he didn't know _how_ you stole her from your father," Shepard parried, "And once he does - and he probably will at some point - you're going to have trouble."

"And you know all this- _how_ exactly?" she asked sternly, her face still a mask of intense dislike.

"It's complicated," he admitted, "And explaining would take more time than you have until Mr. Taylor starts getting suspicious, and you don't really want that to happen, do you? I imagine working with your ex is not as easy as you'd think it would be." Shepard went on, trying his hardest not to sound as if he was gloating.

"No, I do not, and no, it is not. I will leave now, but this is **not** over," she conceded, picking up the file from where she dropped it and walking towards the door.

"I know. That was the intention."

* * *

Shepard shifted uneasily in his seat. The doctor looked at him inquisitively, as if expecting some sort of hidden message to reveal itself in his face. She didn't look at all familiar, which was unsettling and relaxing at the same time - at last, he was meeting someone he didn't know as Commander of the Normandy. Or so he thought, for a minute or two.

"Hey Xen, I forgot to tell you, I-" a voice began, opening the door behind Shepard. He turned to look at someone's surprised face which promptly retreated back the way it came and shut the door after itself. The face looked familiar - on later recollection, he placed it as the nurse in Huerta Memorial that was lecturing an injured Marine on the wonders of cloned limb transplantation. The Marine himself died in surgery two weeks ago, Shepard saw his face purely by accident, bumping into the gurney in a hallway because he was still uncertain about walking on crutches.

"Xen?" he asked carefully of the doctor. No wonder he couldn't recognize the face. The nose did seem kinda familiar, though... was **everybody** in here someone he knew?

"Short for Xenia. Doctor Xenia Vassilievna Moreh, that's pronounced Mo-Ray, not whatever you think it might be pronounced if you look at the spelling," she introduced herself, topping it off with a tap of a poster (with a magnificent, if a little cold, view of a stormy sea under stormy clouds with what looked like writing in Russian on it), "Which is Russian for "sea". To curb off any unwanted questions."

Shepard stifled the question about why Russians spelled "Mo-ray" as "Mope" and leaned back in his seat, his curiosity finally satisfied. So this was what Admiral Daro'Xen vas Moreh actually looked like under that faceplate. Too bad he'd never be able to learn Tali'Zorah's face, seeing as how she was damaged in this reality. Judging by Daro'Xen - well, Xenia - and what Javik said about Quarian faces, she must've been breathtakingly beautiful. What a loss.

"And I'm-"

"Commander "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named" Shepard, I'm aware," Xenia replied with a knowing smile that made Shepard want to retch, "Whose amnesia and possible brain damage I'm supposed to estimate and, if possible, reverse."

"And therein lies my question. I assume you're the _new_ doctor the CIA people told me they're bringing in?"

"Oh, you've talked to them already?" she asked with genuine surprise, "I thought they wouldn't get here so soon."

"Oh, they didn't. I literally **only** got out of a meeting with them," Shepard replied, taking a cursory glance across the room. "They made it fairly obvious they desperately want me doing something for them, and for that they need me functional. Which is where you come in, I guess. What kind of doctor are you, anyway?"

"Neurosurgeon. The human brain is like a complex computer, and I'm the engineer that keeps it running," the doctor replied with a satisfied smile, as if savouring a particularly tasty meal, "Which is why yours is so interesting to everybody. They never pull back together as well as yours did after what it went through," she finished with an almost childlike glee.

"Wait, so this is more about getting ahead of the other doctors here in who, say, gets first printing rights on the marvelous story of the man with the electrocuted brain?" Shepard asked with disbelief. The more he looked at the people staffing this place, the more he understood Karin Chakwas and her infinite desire to be a frontline medic - one that only had to deal with contusions, lacerations and decapitations, not reputations, dissertations and discussions.

"And also furthering the goals of Science, of course," she corrected, although the way she obviously capitalized "Science" gave Shepard goosebumps for some reason.

"Of course. So tell me, doctor, did you ever operate on your toys as a child?"

* * *

Upon exiting Dr. Moreh's office, Shepard leaned against the wall, closing his eyes and breathing in slow, careful breaths. She went on talking about how he and his head would be subjected to a barrage of tests to see if there was any internal damage to go along with the external ("And my, aren't those scars _fascinating!_" she said), and how his amnesia could've been the result of neurons being fried by the electricity and then re-started by a second or third shock, which she likened to the overwriting of a cassette tape. Shepard, not knowing what a cassette tape was, simply nodded along, hoping for a swift death.

He looked up at the ceiling, letting his eyes wander in pursuit of a point he could focus his frustration on and maybe set it aflame by sheer force of will. Instead, he found a security camera. A little crude, by the standards he was used to, but still rather unpleasant and unexpe-

_"Cerberus. How could I have been so foolish? If this Cerberus is at least half as twisted as the one I'm used to, this means they are watching and listening to everything that goes on in this place. I can't be certain of talking to anyone, even thinking out loud!"_

He let his eyes wander down from it as casually as he could manage, while his mind raced in a blind panic.

_"Wait. Miranda. If they saw her roughing me- But she's also Cerberus. She can talk her way out of it. Or maybe that room wasn't monitored and that's why they talked to me there? I have to make sure- But if I go there, even if doesn't have cameras inside, the hallway ones will show me snooping, and that would be equally bad and-"_

"Huh, being knocked around by a girl really got to you, hasn't it?" a voice called to him, snapping him out of his thoughts once more. And to think that once he was perfectly aware of his surroundings, all day and all night.

Opening his eyes revealed to him a wheelchair-bound man whose clean-shaven features looked vaguely familiar.

"What girl? The doctor is hardly a girl, and even if you wanted to call her that, she didn't knock me around," he protested aloud, before adding, "At least in the physical sense. I think I can feel the word cruft leaking out of my ears."

"Not her! The shapely one, in the dress that looks like an MC Escher painting," the man said, waving his hand dismissively at Shepard. For some reason, that gesture also felt vaguely familiar.

"Well, she didn't knock me around either," he responded, crossing his arms and wondering whether this was going anywhere.

"Sure, not like I didn't hear you two in there," the man went on with what sounded dangerously like a leer, "You sounded like you were gonna die, man."

"And what makes you think I was knocked around? Maybe it was me doing the knocking. Maybe I even was knocking her up," Shepard ventured with a smile and what he hoped was an air of confidence. It didn't work out.

"A girl like that? Storming out shortly after some angry words with you? Sorry, friend, but that doesn't add up..." a pause, taken up by maneuvering the wheelchair closer to Shepard, "Besides, I still remember fourth grade. I know the difference in sound between someone getting an elbow to the throat and a knocking up to the knock-up receptacle," the wheelchair-bound man said with a chuckle.

"That must've been **some** fourth grade!" Shepard exclaimed, finding himself walking alongside the wheelchair as the unknown insultant laid a path for himself through the hospital's hallways.

"Nah, that was just the throat thing," his sudden companion admitted, "The rest came a lot later."

"So, to what do I owe the honour? We've never even talked before, I think. Not even properly introduced," Shepard probed carefully. There **was** a reason the man came to him, and it wasn't to talk about Miranda. And he looked so familiar, too, though his clean-shaven face didn't remind Shepard of anyone he knew, which, as he'd just learned, was a thing to be on the lookout for in this place.

"Well, you're Shepard, right? I've heard a few things about you," the man began, stopping right before the turn that would bring them to the central "ring" of the building.

"Yeah, I am. And you're... Dammit, I think I heard some of the other guys talking to you in the cafeteria the other day, they called you... Joxer, I think?"


	10. Chapter 10 - Contemplation

**CONTEMPLATION**

"Joker. Joxer was Ted Raimi's character in _Xena: Warrior Princess_," the wheelchair-bound man replied sternly, "But my name's Jeff. Jeff Moreau."

"Nice to meet you, Jeff," Shepard replied, accepting the proferred hand to shake. This Joker was markedly different from the one he was used to - the lack of his perma-stubble being the most outstanding feature. "So what was it that you wanted from me?"

"You're Dr. Tasoni's patient, right?"

"Yes, why does it matter?"

"Is she a good doctor? I really want to swap mine out for her," Joker said, looking over his shoulder cautiously, before dropping into a conspiratorial whisper, _"I think she intends to kill me."_

"Kill you? Why would she do that?" Shepard asked incredulously, risking a glance in the direction that Joker was checking, "What're you in here for, anyway?"

"See these?"

"Your legs?"

"Yeah, my legs. Multiple fractures. I've got brittle bones, you know? Always wanted to be a pilot, did well enough on the simulators, cut my teeth on piloting UAVs, all was well so long as I stayed out of the cockpits and the G-forces they contain, right?"

Shepard nodded along, wondering why this Joker was so insecure. Probably because he was constantly seeking validation of his skill - something he would be forever denied in a world without the mass effect dampening the forces that would normally crush his brittle bones into a fine dust.

"And that puts you into a wheelchair- how exactly?" he wondered out loud, already knowing the answer. _Optimism._

"So they tell me - there's this new experimental material for seats, new belt designs to reduce the loads, I won't feel a thing, it's like floating in water. Right, water. Very hard water, maybe, with sharp rocks in it right below the surface. First test flight - and _this_ happens," he explained bitterly. "Now melding them is a pain in the butt, but then there's the doc, who keeps insisting on me taking loads of medicine and-"

"Mr. Moreau!" a stern voice called out from around the corner. It sounded familiar enough - and, of course, no sooner than Shepard realized who it belonged to, Dr. Karin Chakwas rounded the corner, striding purposefully into view and straight at Joker, who desperately tried to scramble away, caught a wheel of his wheelchair on Shepard's foot (rollling over it for good measure, making Shepard grit his teeth in order to not swear in front of the doctor) and was finally pinned in place when she managed to grab the wheelchair's pushbar before he gained any momentum.

"Good afternoon, doctor," Shepard said with a slight corteous nod before carefully duck-walking over to a wall to rest against it so he could rub the hurt foot. It didn't feel damaged in any way, but the sensation was not at all pleasant.

"See what you did, Mr Moreau? This is what happens when you don't take your medication on time!" the doctor said chastisingly as she wrestled with Joker for control of the wheelchair. Shepard used this moment to look her over - while undoubtedly recognizable, it was also plainly evident that being a hospital doctor was not something Dr. Chakwas enjoyed. Of course, recalling her words about how badly she _needed_ to be a battlefield, or at least a frontline shipboard medic, Shepard perfectly understood why - not everyone was cut out for being a patient person, in either sense of the word. And while her medical skills definitely made her qualified for this job, her interpersonal skills definitely were better-suited for a "sewing a wounded soldier back together" type of medical work rather than "nursing him back to health".

"But doc, do I really need it that badly? And with the needles?" Joker protested meekly, apparently giving up the fight.

"If you ever want to walk again, yes! Your bones **need** any extra help they can get if you want them to be strong enough for that!" the doctor explained, her voice softening as she realized her victory. Turning the wheelchair around, she nodded greeting at Shepard, who felt vaguely offended at her not addressing him before realizing that this Chakwas didn't know him and probably wouldn't share a drink with him even if she drank here at all. A moment's contemplation of her harried face told him that she probably does, although what she uses in place of Serrice Ice Brandy remained a mystery for him as he turned to go his own way.

* * *

"So tell me, Shepard, have you found your salvation?" the voice inquired in a mocking tone. It was oddly familiar, as if something he'd heard a long while ago as a child and simply hadn't heard in a long time. Something you thought you've forgotten, only to remember it at the first sounds if it returning.

"Or did you find destruction?" another added, sounding as if it was a yell, coming from far far away.

"Bound by flesh, stranded in darkness, cursed to exist with your fate already decided for you," a third voice whispered, this one female unlike the previous two - a fact that Shepard only noticed now that he had something to compare them to.

"Who are you?" he yelled into the blackness that surrounded him, turning around needlessly. His steps echoed across what sounded like an empty open structure, a cathedral maybe.

"We are the victims of your rash decisions," the first voice said hoarsely, "Those you doomed to die for your own petty reasons."

"Sparatus?" Shepard asked incredulously, "But-"

"I'm dead, yes," the Turian councillor's voice agreed, and Shepard thought he could just make out a faint trace of his facepaint glowing in the darkness ahead. "And it's not very fun."

"As are we all," Valern's voice chimed in, "Because you chose to protect your precious human fleet instead of the government of the galaxy. Tell me, how did that work out for you?" A faint outline of his hood presented itself a little to the left of Sparatus's apparition.

"I- I don't know," Shepard admitted, "I got stuck here, in this travesty of a hospital, before I could see **where** it all actually lead."

"However you twist the facts, Sparatus, Shepard did warn us of the Reapers," Tevos finally said, measuring every word, "And he was right - what good is protecting one ship with three useless politicians onboard when that would have meant losing valuable battleships? You of all among us should understand that, as a Turian." Her tattoos faded into view on the other side of Sparatus. Shepard thought he could almost make out their eyes as they exchanged glances, like they always did in life. He never liked it then, and now it felt downright creepy.

"But did that actually give Shepard anything? Did killing us in the name of saving his fleets help save his planet? Did it help _him_ survive?" Valern continued, unrelentingly.

"No. In the end it all came down to an ancient superweapon that we found the plans to," Shepard replied, almost as an excuse, "And I'm not even sure **that** wasn't just another Reaper trap, like the Citadel. Things fell into place around building it a little **_too_** easily, fitting too well."

"And now you're dead. And we're dead," Sparatus reaffirmed, "And the galaxy is-"

"I'M NOT DEAD!" Shepard exploded, putting his foot down in front of him with a pound that reverberated through the entire- _Council chamber! That's what it was!_

"Is that what you think?" Tevos said, her voice fading along with the glow of her face, "What proof you have that all of this is not some sort of delusion, the last stand of a dying brain, desperately trying to cling to life as it disintegrates in a Reaper beam?"

* * *

Shepard woke with a start, still feeling the burning sensation - the exact same one he had when Harbinger shot him in London. He hoped he didn't cry out, because explaining how an amnesiac could be having nightmares, conversing with the dead and generally displaying signs of PTSD he wasn't supposed to be having, would have probably been difficult.

He waited for a short while as his eyes adapted to the darkness of his room, however easy that was with the moonlight penetrating the rather flimsy window shades. _"Huh. Funny how easily I think of it as 'my' room now. What has happened to me? When did I become so accepting of the situation?"_

He got off the bed, stretching and walking to the window. Autumn was already in full swing - by his reckoning he awoke sometime around his birthday and even so, the progress he was making on the way to recovery was astounding not only to the doctors. In the span of these few months, he was almost back to the shape he was in when he signed up for the service - a few more in that manner, and he'd be N1 Candidate material again. Getting back to N7, however, in a non-augmented body... Now that would be a challenge. The thought of leaving the hospital didn't even feel so practical anymore, not when he was still unprepared for the world outside, not knowing if there even **was** a world outside.

The hospital grounds were brightly lit by the moon, and the absence of shadow only served to underscore how much of a fortress the hospital actually was - short of bringing in a lot of troops with grenade launchers, mortars and maybe tanks, it could easily be called impregnable. The moonlight, however, also served to outline for him a car - a van, actually - approaching quetly down one of the service roads that criss-crossed the grounds 'behind' the hospital - on the morgue side - presumably so as not to upset the patients with the sight of the cadavers that could be brought up directly to the morgue for whatever reason, perhaps if the patient was DoA. This one, however, was very much alive, writhing on the gurney she was strapped to as she was unloaded from the van and wheeled to the hospital's service entrance.

He was sure it was a 'she' from the slim legs and a slimpse of what looked like a bare breast. The girl was wearing only an oversized bush jacket and remains of jeans that looked like she ran through a thicket or maybe a garbage dump full of glass and metal in order to get them ripped up so badly. All of that added up for unsavoury conclusions which culminated in a chilling thought when Shepard realized that every bit of exposed flesh of the girl wasn't covered in dirt or blood, but _tattoos_.


	11. Chapter 11 - Consolation

**CONSOLATION**

"Shepard."

"Rex."

Their exchange of greetings went the usual way in the gym, sort of an everyday ritual. Shepard's muscle mass yielded slowly to his efforts, although he kept feeling unjustifiably scrawny, especially when compared to the Kro- the other man's physique. Thinking of Rex as not being Wrex was difficult, not with the gravelly voice or the same determined look in his eyes that seemed to be constantly weighing up everything he saw on a scale of _"If we fight, who will kill whom?"_

"Seen the new girl yet?" Shepard asked, as casually as he could, picking out the weights for one of the machines.

"New girl?" Rex asked, raising an eyebrow in question. Somehow, that very human gesture looked alien to Shepard - until he realized that even if Krogans could understand the emotive qualities of human and Asari facial expressions, they might not have been able to accurately reproduce them. In short, the Wrex he knew couldn't ever do that, at least, not that high.

"Yeah, bald, all tattooed up - saw them bringing her in yesterday night," Shepard explained, preparing for the warm-up and stretching.

"Hmm. Sounds interesting, Shepard, but no, I ain't seen anyone like that today," Rex replied, furrowing his brow, "Though if I said I _never_ saw anyone _like_ that, I would be lying through my teeth, hehe."

Shepard gave him a weak smile in return before settling into the machine, preparing to give his arms another torturous session. Even though Lara urged him to not overdo it, he **had** to. He felt oddly compelled to get himself back into fighting shape, especially now that- But that would still not be a good enough reason to tear his arms off because he pushed himself too hard.

"What is this I hear about a new girl?" another voice joined in. Knowingly or not, but out of all the people from his memories that populated this place, Shepard managed to form a clique of instant friends based off his original team on the SR-1. For better or for worse, the only one missing was Tali.

"Vakarian, I thought you only had place for one girl in your sights," he laughed, "Speaking of which - still haven't worked up the courage to talk to her?"

Changing the subject helped. He knew what was probably happening to _her_ while he was here, talking, laughing. He knew he couldn't do anything about it at the moment. He had to be ready, and for that... he needed his team. And that meant getting **someone** to talk to Natalie. Even if it was Garry and his weird affection for her - apparently, he preferred to admire her from a distance.

"Come on, Shepard, you know as well as I do how that would look," he said defensively, "I don't want to come off as a stalker or something."

"No, Garry, I don't. You **like** her. Start with that," Shepard replied with a reproachful look, "This isn't high school, you're both grown-ups in a grown-up hospital for grown-ups that got boo-boos doing grown-up things that leave **normal** grown-ups cowering in a fetal position for the rest of their lives. Stalking is for them. With us, that's tactical reconnaissance."

_"I can't believe I'm playing therapist again. This makes me wonder if it's just my bad luck or there really are no therapists worth their salt in the Universe at large. At least this time we didn't have to involve organ traffickers."_

"You make it sound so easy. What if she gets creeped out? **What if she doesn't even speak English?** I mean, we've got all types here, I can barely understand what that glass-eyed dude is-"

"Vakarian, take a chill pill," Rex interrupted, "Because now you're making **me** feel like we're in high school. Not a good idea."

"Let's put it that way. If you're not gonna talk to her, **I** will, and then it will be **exactly** like high school," Shepard said in a mock threatening tone, his grin widening. Whatever the reasons, he was enjoying this. It felt... relaxing, somehow.

"You- I-" Garry's pursuit of words to say was entertaining to watch, but didn't result in much of anything. "This is blackmail, you know that? Fine, I'll talk to her. **Tomorrow.**"

As he left, shoulders hunched as if he was bested at some competition, Rex and Shepard exchanged glances.

"You're gonna talk to her anyway, right?"

"Naturally. Today, too."

"You're kind of a sucky friend, Shepard."

"That remains to be seen, Rex."

* * *

He had to admit, however, this Vakarian was a bit of a stalker. Without even trying, Shepard learned more about Natalie's life than he probably knew about Tali's - just by hanging out with the guy - so finding where she was in her rather rigid daily routine on this Wednesday noon was relatively easy. She would spend a little under an hour in the sun in the rear courtyard, out beyond the morgue - where most patients seldom wandered except for the ones jogging, and these seldom went there at noon, making it probably the most secluded sun-exposed spot on the grounds except maybe the main building's roof. Except it was prettier, and also accessible to patients, unlike the roof. Walking out onto the sun-warmed pavement, Shepard took a deep breath of the autumn air - still warm, but already showing hints of the cold that was to come - and made for the roundabout walking path that would, eventually, lead him to the rear courtyard.

True to the plan, she was there, bandages and all, sitting somewhat stiffly on a bench not readily visible behind some service outbuilding and a few bushes planted along its walls. It seemed as if the entire hospital grounds were planned out with the intent to provide an attacking force the least possible cover while maintaining the appearance of a properly-maintained hospital. Shepard inwardly thanked himself for checking first whether Garry had any doctor appointments - at the moment he was supposed to be getting a check-up on his right-side eye from Dr. Martin Solace (which didn't really look anything like his Salarian counterpart, aside from a missing earlobe, though he was apparently a coffee addict).

As casually as possible, he walked up to the bench in question and plopped down on it rather nonchalantly on the end opposite to the target. A little voice in his head proclaimed _"LZ is clear, mission is go, proceed with contact!"_ He tried to tune it out to the best of his ability.

"Hello," he began, turning to her, "You might not know me, but my name is-"

"Shepa_r_d," she said, facing him as well. Garry was right - the bandages were spaced unevenly, though they didn't reveal much of anything, other than a vague outline of a vaguely feminine face (except maybe the nose was a little big for Shepard's taste) and what were apparently deep blue eyes, "I was wonde_r_ing when you would app_r_oach _m_e."

"Huh. And to what do I owe the honour of my name preceding me?" Shepard asked, trying as hard as possible to not come off as taken aback.

"Co_m_e on, Shepa_r_d. I'm a t_r_ained CIA agent, don't you think I can notice a _r_ec_r_uit_m_ent attem_p_t when I see one?" she retorted, "I _m_ean, hal_f_ the hospital knows you'_r_e _b_uilding so_m_e so_r_t of clique a_r_ound you_r_sel_f_ _fr_o_m_ othe_r_patients."

"Is that what you think this is?" Shepard asked, smiling micheviously.

"Well, I see no othe_r_ _p_ossi_b_ility he_r_e. We'_r_e in a_b_out the only _p_lace in the enti_r_e hos_p_ital that isn't cove_r_ed by secu_r_ity came_r_as, so unless you'_r_e he_r_e to t_r_y a pitch for Ce_rb_e_r_us o_r_ whoeve_r_ it is you _r_e_pr_esent, I suggest-"

"Wait, Cerberus? You honestly think I'm with Cerberus?" Shepard interrupted. This was quickly getting out of hand.

"Well, you did _m_eet with thei_r_ _p_eo_p_le _r_ecently, did you not? Talked to the wo_m_an in _pr_ivate a_f_te_r_ the "o_ff_icial" _r_etu_r_n to acti_v_e duty talk, e_v_en," Natalie went on, with what looked like a small tight-lipped smile forming under the bandages.

"Ah, that is why you bandage yourself despite not needing to," Shepard attempted to fight back with, "You have eyes **everywhere**?"

The bandaged woman laughed, before tugging on an end of bangade that was tucked in behind her left ear (which looked a little undersized, even for one tightly bound by bandage), unwrapping a portion of her face around her eyes. The smile was wiped off Shepard's face, his eyes narrowed, his jaw set. He had a sudden urge to find whoever did this and remove some vital parts of their anatomy. She wasn't very badly scarred - he could see that she **was** beautiful, once, but what remained now served more as a reminder of what was rather than any hope for what it could be.

"Sorry. I didn't mean to offend," he finally said as she covered her eyebrowless burn-scarred forehead and nose back up behind the white fabric, "Although I have to wonder - why do you keep track of everything that happens in the hospital, yet don't talk to anybody but the doctors?"

"My the_r_a_p_ist says I have to do so_m_ething. Kee_p_ _m_yself occu_p_ied. _F_ocused. Until... Until I get bette_r_, so_m_ehow, though what constitutes _b_ette_r_ in this state is anyone's guess," she replied slowly, the bitterness in her voice building up.

"How did this happen?" Shepard asked, quietly wondering if placing a hand on her shoulder with intent to reassure would produce a broken hand, a reassurance or a psychotic break.

"I got soaked in gasoline and set on fi_r_e," she explained flatly, "then left, _b_u_r_ned and _b_leeding, in f_r_ont of the A_m_e_r_ican e_mb_assy whe_r_e I wo_r_ked as _p_a_r_t of _m_y cove_r_. The du_mb_est thing was, they didn't do it because I was a s_p_y. They did it _b_ecause I was a wo_m_an who wo_r_ked fo_r_ the "heathen _p_igs" at the e_mb_assy, and o_ff_ended thei_r_ _r_eligious _f_eelings with _m_y uncove_r_ed _f_ace and hai_r_."

She gave a hollow laugh, rubbing at her eyes through the bandages - wiping tears into them, as Shepard belatedly realized.

"Not e_v_e_r_y CIA agent is so_m_e so_r_t of _m_a_r_tial a_r_ts ex_p_e_r_t li_v_ing wea_p_on, you know," she said as if it was an explanation of sorts, although Shepard found himself nodding in agreement, if only to make her feel better about it, "The _m_ost I could _m_anage was b_r_eak the a_rm_ o_f_ one of the_m_ and gouge out the eye o_f_ anothe_r_. I'_m_ a data analyst, not a _f_ield o_p_e_r_ati_v_e, чё_р_т _п_о_б_ери."

"If it makes you feel any better, that's a lot more than I usually manage in such situations," Shepard admitted, "Eyes are generally unpleasant to stick your fingers in."

"A_r_en't you a soldie_r_? Killing is su_pp_osed to be you_r_ _pr_o_f_ession," Natalie replied with disbelief.

"Oh, it is. I just don't like dealing with eyes. While quick, harming heads to kill people is almost universally repulsive. I still have the occasional nightmare about some of the... bursts." _Particularly Batarians. Four popped eyes is twice the revulsion._

"Then how do you-"

"I'm the "shoot-from-far-away" kind of soldier, Tali," Shepard explained, not even bothering to chastise himself for overplaying his hand with the name, "Because when you shoot from up close, it's certainly showing up in your nightmares again, especially if it's not human," he paused, before something in his head clicking, compelling him to finish the phrase, "Not after what you did to kill it."

"Like _m_e?" she asked bitterly, but without the hint of tears in her voice. She was unhinged, he could see that much, but she did have some sort of training in suppressing it, keeping it under control. This still didn't explain the rest of her behaviour, or the paranoia about Cerberus... but it had to wait.

"Oh no, you're still you, inside," he tried to comfort her, "You're still the same person, who still walks, talks, thinks and, from what I've seen, works out, the same as before."

"And **you** we_r_e gi_v_ing **_m_****e** g_r_ie_f_ o_v_e_r_ "eyes e_v_e_r_ywhe_r_e"?" she asked with another half-visible smile. Shepard had an assumption why she didn't even try to smile widely and he wasn't too keen to find out the answer.

"Reconnaissance before approaching you. You see, there's this guy..."


	12. Chapter 12 - Interaction

**INTERACTION**

While Garry fumed (a lot) about Shepard approaching Natalie without his consent, permission, knowledge, blessing or any other form of agreement, he was also thankful (a lot, though not as big a lot) that he didn't have to do the opening speech himself. It still felt rather awkward, seeing the two of them talking, not quite knowing what to do with their hands and, well, bodies in general. It was evident that Vakarian was the hands-on type, but something inside of him made him worry a lot about whether it was safe for him to touch her, or (_[insert deity name here]_ forbid) put his arm around her waist. She, in turn, looked a little more interested in Shepard (who tried to make it clear that he was the intermediary here and not Cyrano in any applicable way, up to and including nasal proportions) than in Garry, but still listened to what little shy words he could get out of himself.

This almost made him forget that he now had an actual mission here: finding Jack and getting her out of whatever hole Cerberus decided to bury her in. Somehow, there was no doubt in his mind about the nature of her relationship with Cerberus - the manner of her delivery to the hospital was anything but cordial. The only open question that remained was how Jack would view _him_ - did she even know him in this world? He spent what free time he had in that day on walking through all the hallways of the main building that he was allowed to venture in, looking around for places some sort of stairway, or maybe elevator, could have been hidden.

Information gathering. He needed information gathering resources. He could not quite press the doctors for information like that - chances were that would either force his hand about his amnesia and/or real intentions, or the doctor wouldn't even know of any secret locations on the premises. Either way would be a waste of time, time neither he nor she had. But he had a starting point, or what seemed like one. One that was to come rolling in of her own accord in a couple of days...

* * *

"I take it your recovery is progressing well, Commander?" Taylor started, looking somewhat tired and downcast. If Shepard had to guess, he'd say the NSA man was hung over. Overlooking the slight deja vu in the question, he nodded without saying anything.

Even to the casual observer he no longer appeared to be that same gaunt scarred figure that woke up from his coma- how long ago that was? Two months? Four? The daily routine with no discernible weekdays or weekends had quickly robbed him of any palpable way to tell the dates accurately, and he could only freshen up his internal calendar during his visits to Dr. Moreh who had an old-timey day-by-day flip calendar on her desk. And he couldn't even be certain that **she** kept it flipped to the right day. The more he thought about how patients were handled here, the more he realized how justified Natalie's paranoia really was. This felt like a half-research, half-indoctrination facility for converting enemy agents. For all he knew, it could've been Cerberus that electrocuted him - well, his local counterpart whose body he was loaning - to begin with!

"I also see you've intensified your physical and weapons training," Miranda chimed in. She also looked tired, but a different kind of tired. The kind he'd often seen in his own face in the mirror, back on the Normandy, especially when he woke in the night, sometimes screaming, sometimes simply drenched in cold sweat. The tiredness of someone who'd recently seen combat but wasn't quite certain whether it was worth it.

"Have to get myself prim and ready for fieldwork, don't I?" Shepard replied jokingly, finally gracing them with speech. They both looked somewhat puzzled at his demeanor, quite different from the one they saw during their previous meeting.

"That's an interesting change of pace, Commander," Jacob admitted, leaning forward to rest his hands against the table, clasping his fingers together as he did so. "Can I ask what brought it about?"

"Cabin fever. I'm getting very tired of sitting around on my thumbs here, and your doctors don't seem to be making any progress with figuring out what went wrong in my brain. Far as I can tell from what little they tell me, I'm healthy. **Too healthy** for their purposes, I think."

"Nothing wrong with that, I'm sure," Miranda replied, flipping through the most recent entries in his medical records. He saw some sort of tables with lots of meaningless numbers in there, what looked like a series of cross-section images of his brain littered with dozens of post-its with Dr. Moreh's panicked tiny scrawling on them, and a tracing of the scar patterns on both of his cheeks, apparently for analysis on how bizarrely symmetric they were.

"Well, if that's the case, when can I get out of here and actually **do** something worthwhile?" Shepard finally asked, leaning back in his seat. That was the million-credit question, the one he'd been leading up to. Well, that and fishing something out of Miranda when (if?) he could get her alone and separated from Taylor's doubting gaze. Which he certainly turned to her way too often for such a simple line of conversation.

"Once we get the all-clear from the medical staff, of course," Miranda replied with a fake smile and equally fake reassurance. Shepard smirked and nodded.

"Very well. I take it we're done here?" he asked, getting up, almost enjoying the incredulous way their looks followed him up.

"Guess so," Jacob admitted after the initial shock wore off - he certainly wasn't ready for a cooperative Shepard, which gave Shepard himself all the answers he has been trawling for. Well, almost all. "You comin'?" he asked of Miranda, half-turning to her as she collected the files off the desk.

"As soon as I've turned these over to Dr. Moreh, yeah," she replied, "I've got a few questions for her as well."

"Should I come with?"

"No, thanks."

* * *

"Thanks for the intel. Nikita was exchanging e-mails with my father, as it turned out, apparently working himself up to spill the beans. Now he won't," she began abruptly once they rounded a corner. Shepard was expecting it, but still almost jumped when she spoke.

"No worries. Just so long as your sister is safe."

"What do you get from this?" Miranda asked, turning to look at him walking beside her, his hands in pockets, unkempt hair practically begging to be combed.

"Your friendly disposition, I hope," he replied earnestly. This spy stuff was starting to grow on him, he admitted to himself.

"Wonderful. And what do you expect it would help you get from me? Sex? Money? A ticket out of here?" she asked with mock seriousness. Apparently, she found the whole thing amusing.

"Well, admiration for my cosmic knowledge would be nice. Did you know your father and your chain-smoking boss are planning a research project together?" he went on without skipping a beat, "Don't know the specifics, but it does involve practically grabbing people off the street to be guinea pigs in potentially lethal experiments."

"And you know this for certain?"

"No more or less certain than the knowledge of you having a benign tumor that will probably impact your ability to have children," Shepard replied softly, trying to not make it sound like gloating. From the pained expression on her face, he assumed he succeeded, to some extent.

"How did you-"

"Don't remember. Honest."

"Fine. You know all about me. What do you want from me then?" she finally asked in a somewhat hurried way - they were one turn away from Xen's office.

"Does this hospital have any basement floors? A subterranean facility perhaps?" Shepard asked as a way of replying, "I've seen more patients come and go in the dark than in the day, and very few of them actually show up in the building during daylight, even of the live ones."

"That's it?" she asked incredulously.

"That's a pretty big **_it_**, I've recognized a couple of people. Thinking the worst here right now."

"I don- **Wait.** You **recognized** people?"


	13. Chapter 13 - Reaction

**REACTION**

"Yeah. Recognized," Shepard repeated slowly, emphasizing the word as if trying to magically change its meaning, "It's actually funny how you don't mind me knowing a lot of personal details about your life, but the idea that I might be remembering things from my own is suddenly outlandish," he continued calmly, slowing his pace before stopping - they've reached Dr. Moreh's office now.

"Sorry, it just... threw me off," she fumbled for a response, "Because-"

"-I was no friend to Cerberus before all **this**, yeah, and you were unsure how I would take the revelation, or recollections about it," he finished for her. Shepard briefly considered if a comforting hand on the shoulder would be interpreted badly in this context before taking the plunge anyway. It felt weird to be touching actual fabric and not whatever nano-modified material worn by the Miranda he was more used to, but that thought took the equivalent of the back seat in the last car of his train of thoughts as he squeezed her shoulder lightly before letting go.

"_You_ need to hold it together, Miri," he began quickly, knowing that if they dawdle any longer, Jacob would get suspicious, if he hasn't yet, "I know you have doubts in Cerberus and they're well justified, but I'm probably your best bet of clawing your way out of the snare they built around you, and like it or not, you're my main hope to getting my life back."

She looked up at him with a weird mix of contempt, expectation and longing - in short, what he registered as a "normal Miranda look" - and turned to leave without a word. He sighed inwardly and knocked on the doctor's door.

* * *

"So what's this important thing you needed us to hear, Shepard?" the scarred man asked, shifting in his seat.

"All in due time, Rex," Shepard replied, turning to check on the attendance, "Not everyone's here yet."

He had a plan, and he was going to put it into action, but before that he would need to secure their cooperation. And that in and of itself was a veritable puzzle. He was surrounded by his SR-1 team, and somehow that was a comforting feeling, because even this way, these people brought out a sense of security and reliability in him.

Unfortunately, it wouldn't be easy this time out: while Natalie had her own, as-yet-unmentioned, beef with Cerberus and Garry would probably follow her and Shepard easily, Kaidan's and Joker's conditions made them liabilities, Lara was a staff member and Ashley and Rex weren't exactly Shepard's fans. His only real hope was to push for the importance of ascertaining whether there were any experiments being conducted here illegally, and if there were, making damn sure they would stop. That was the only way he'd probably get the doubters on his side, if anything, and that was a big "if". He could worry about the SR-2 folks, what little of them were here and in usable condition, later.

Ashley was the last to arrive, and it took quite a lot of coaxing on Kaidan's part, apparently, to even get her here. They were gathered on and around the blind spot bench that Shepard found Natalie on, with the girls seated and the guys forming a half-circle around them with Shepard in the center.

"Alright, skipper, let it all out," Ashley finally said, seeing everyone's expectant looks. Shepard nodded in response.

"I'll start small. What do you guys know about Cerberus?"

He watched with grim satisfaction as Tali nodded somberly, but the rest of them looked puzzled.

"The three-headed dog of Hades?" Garry asked cautiously, "Guarding the entrance to the Greek underworld?"

Shepard smiled, presenting a piece of the hospital's stationery, tapping the characteristic black-and-orange logo.

"No, Cerberus, the black ops team," he finally responded, "Don't know much of their precise origins except that the CIA had some hand in their creation a while back, and since then they've upgraded themselves from "black ops team with plausible deniability" into "black ops clandestine organization answering to no-one which for the CIA is an active liability".

"Wait, isn't this-" Kaidan said gesturing at the insignia Shepard held in his hand, then in the direction of the hospital, "You don't mean-"

"He doe_s_," Natalie interjected, her voice strained as if she was holding back tears. Or rage, "I'_v_e... had _r_un-in_s_ wi_th_ _th_em be_f_o_r_e... _this_. You know," she added with fake dismissiveness, gesturing at her face.

"Alright. So tell us about this Cerberus," Ashley replied coolly with the air of someone who was just told they're talking to a famous holofilm star she'd never heard about before.

"As I said, black ops. Tightly structured, cell-based, each cell operating on its own, the cell leaders answering to regional leaders answering to sector leaders answering to the Three Big Men (or possibly Women) In Charge answering to One Very Smug Chain-Smoking Bastard," Shepard begain to explain, miming a pyramid with his hands as he listed the tiers. "Dealing in pretty much everything at once. Arms trafficking, illicit medical experimentation, pursuing political and economic power, all in the name of propagating their version of a Pure And Bright Future For Humanity."

"Define _pure_," Rex growled, his upper lip quivering noticeably with irritation. For the first time since he met this version of his favourite Krogan in the galaxy, Shepard noticed the skin tone and the prominent nose bridge and the eyes. His mind reeled at the thought of Urdnot Wrex- sorry, Rex Burton- being of Amerindian (_Heck, they probably call it something different here!_) descent.

"That's anyone's guess, Rex," Shepard said with a shrug before realizing he had an answer, "Those two that came to interview me - both Cerberus operatives, and the man's not white, but that's the official motto, last I checked," he explained, trying hard to keep the uncertainty out of his voice, "Of course, that was before my coma, and I don't remember _everything_ as clearly as I would have wished to," he added, wondering if he'll ever be able to - or, come to think of it, have to - come clean with them about it. Still, the reaction was unplanned-for. Xenophobia meant something different on pre-spaceflight Earth, he remembered. Best not forget it again.

"What I do know for certain is that they have many bases such as this hospital, used for medical research."

"Next thing you're gonna say, we're the test subjects," Garry chimed in, finally joining the conversation.

"Well, it's cliche as hell to say _"funny you should mention that"_, but we sort of are, Garry," Shepard responded, cringing inwardly at the faces everyone made in his general direction.

"Are you maybe going to elucidate on that, Commander?" Kaidan asked carefully, the tension making him stretch out the words - this sounded familiar to Shepard, although he could not quite remember whether the Kaidan he was more used to ever did that himself.

"All of us in here represent singular examples of moderately weird conditions. Natalie and her miraculous burn recovery, Garry's skull-defying rocket kiss, Ashley's unique radiation sickness without the sickness? Messani's half-a-skull transplant, my electrocution, Kaidan's whatever it is inside of his head- there's not a lot of repeats of diagnoses in here that I'm aware of," Shepard rattled off, nodding at the people present whenever he mentioned them.

"But I saw this other guy with a bandaged-up face-" Rex posited before being interrupted.

"Cal _R_yke_r_, yeah," Tali intervened, "So_r~r_y, he'_s_ got _s_o_m_e _s_o_r_t of e_x_po_s_u_r_e da_m_age, _f_ro_m_ _wh_at I'_v_e managed _t_o o_v_e_r_hea_r_. You know how you can ac_t_ually ge_t_ wo_rs_e _s_unbu_r_n_s_ on i_c_ecap_s_ and-" she trailed off, noticing the looks everyone gave her.

"Alright, Shepard, suppose we believe you. What interest have you in telling us?"

Ashley's words gave voice to the unspoken question that thickened the air to the point you could probably hang a sign on it. Shepard smiled in response.

"I need your help to bring this place down."


	14. Chapter 14 - Attrition

**ATTRITION**

"Aaaaalrighty then," Ashley began unsurely, looking around the faces of the others. They had pretty much the same reaction as she did to Shepard's declaraction of intent to bring the house down, so to speak. Confusion. "Let me clarify a few things first."

"Yes?"

"You want us, a bunch of people with next to no relation to you _or_ each other," she asked, gesturing to the others, "To help _you_ perform an act of sabotage and potential property damage to a hospital that's treating us? All because of some half-remembered grievance with a secret organization that's supposedly trying to recruit you?"

"Fair point," Shepard nodded, admitting defeat. Honestly, what _was_ he expected with pursuing this line of conversation? He had forgotten, once again, that while these people reminded him of his crew, they were _not_ them, "I'll get back to you on that," he added as he turned and stalked off back in the direction of the hospital building, leaving the others looking at each other in awkward silence.

* * *

"So, Shepard, I see my lessons have been all for naught," the gravely voice said, cutting into the peace of his sleep, some vague dream about the fields of Horizon, burning.

"Wh~~" Shepard tried to ask, but found himself unable to utter a single sound. He was still asleep, or whatever it was called when the spectres came. This was the third time this week. _What do they WANT?!_

The darkness slowly gave way to glowing blue eyes with the familiar husk triangles. Illusive Man? No, these eye were not set in a human's skull...

"Saren?" he asked incredulously, apparently no longer smothered by the blackness now that the pale blue glow of the undead Turian's eyes blossomed out of the void, "What did I do to deserve you haunting me?"

"You're asking the wrong question, Butcher of Torfan," the Turian bareface sneered (at least that's how Shepard interpreted the tone and the flaring of mandibles - even after all these years, he still had trouble interpreting Turian facial expressions), summoning an entirely unrelated train of thought in Shepard's mind. Saren was a bareface, however hard it was to tell under all those metallic pieces he had grafted to himself over what seemed to be years of consorting and plotting with Sovereign, judging from things he'd been told by Anderson. That by itself should have made everything he said or did suspect to the Council, at least to Sparatus, but alas...

"Did we know not to trust him? At first, yes, but he _did_ gain that reputation for actual achievements, don't forget," the shade of Sparatus said from nowhere in particular. Shepard's loathing for these phantoms grew stronger with every visit they paid him, and if they started making conference calls... he'd probably go insane before long.

"Very well, what questions would have been the correct ones, o Scimitar of Palaven?" Shepard retorted, wondering if the indignation on his face actually meant anything to the phantom.

"What did you do to NOT deserve this, of course," the Turian laughed, his lifeless blue eyes of one touched by the Reapers twinkling with what in a human would have probably been called "mirth".

"Convincing you to not throw all organic life in the galaxy away on a whim of an ancient machine god was not enough?" Shepard asked, wondering that himself.

"Considering what you chose to do when the time you thus bought had finally ran out? Dear kettle, this is pot, don't look now, but we're _both_ black! Mwahahaa!"

As the phantom's laughter grew hysterical, shaking sickeningly as if Saren intended to laugh forever, never running out of breath, Shepard mused that, in retrospect, all the metallic bits on Saren looked very definitively Geth-made, something he could've pointed out to the Council back when it was relevant. He was having a surprising amount of these hindsight revelations now that he had a seemingly endless supply of time to have them in.

"Could'a, would'a, should'a," the phantom laughed, "You're a loser, Shepard, in that world and in this one too, you can't even protect the woman you love!" it accusingly exclaimed, probably with a pointing finger too, had the head not been disembodied as it floated through the darkness, the blue pinpricks of its eyes pissing Shepard off more and more with every passing moment.

...And then something loud happened in the real world that finally, mercifully, wrenched him awake, away from this forsaken shade of the one he was in danger of becoming.

* * *

As he rolled off the bed in a practiced move that would have theoretically removed him from the line of fire of a prospective gunman entering through the door, Shepard struggled to waken not only his muscles, but also his senses. The sound that woke him did not repeat itself, and it was not even entirely clear to him what the sound was, he was too engrossed in focusing his hatred on Saren's blood-chilling laughter.

As his mind agreed to acknowledge that the door was not flung open, revealing the expected black-and-white faceless armours of Cerberus Troopers, he picked himself off the floor, letting go of the improvised shiv he had made the traditional prisoner way of sharpening a toothbrush (the cafeteria, sadly, did not allow the patients access to metal utensils and stealing a cafeteria tray for its harder plastic was not very practical). He let out a breath of relief, replaced the shiv into its usual hiding place inside of his bed's metal framework and walked over to the window.

The night outside was moonless, windy and not very inviting. He felt a burning hatred rising in his chest, hatred at Saren for being right, hatred at himself for being too weak, for deliberating while who-knows-what was being done to Jack in the bowels of the very building he was merely sleeping in earlier, for not being able to convince the people he intended to trust but whose trust he could not secure. There was a lot to be angry about, but also a lot of reasons for why things went the way they did.

He was so caught up in the self-loathing that he almost missed the cone of light cast upon the freshly-mown lawn by an open door somewhere in the wall below him, disgorging what very obviously looked like a guard going out for a smoke. Nothing unnatural there except for- the submachine gun slung on the man's back? This was the first openly worn weapon Shepard has seen in all his time here (which, in retrospect, he was still unsure of, the regime forced on him by the doctors seemingly designed entirely around the idea of getting him to lose track of time, he was not entirely sure even what _month_ it was, let alone the duration of his stay), which set off a whole lot of warning flags at once.

Especially when he realised what that door was and where it probably led, seeing as it didn't line up with any hallways he remembered checking for subterranean access, because the idea that an_ external _door might do that never crossed his mind to begin with.

* * *

What he did next wasn't quite a dash, not quite a shuffle, but a flurry of activity nonetheless, as quiet and as out of the way of the cameras whose positions he had memorized as he could muster short of just outright running down the shortest path to that door before the guard finished his cigarette. He went unarmed because what he was planning did not require anything his body could not already do, not after an indeterminate amount of time exhausting himself in the gym, practicing in the firing range and generally getting himself busy. Quietly slipping through the door that led out to that side of the building was not an option - it was covered by a security camera.

However, there was another way: an easily-openable window just around the corner from that door as far as the exterior of the building was concerned which was actually the window of an exam room that did not always get locked up for the night, and tonight it was not. Quietly, he stalked to the corner, peeking around it. It seemed that smoking underground was prohibited and they did this in shifts, as now a different guard was standing in his place, smoking his part. Perhaps they only came out at night, when no patient could see them? Foolish, then, to place them under the window of the one patient who actually gave a damn about who they worked for.

A quick jab to the neck, a Justicar technique throw that Samara once taught him in the off days between fighting Collectors, and the guard's uniform, weapon and passcard were his.

He had maybe thirty to forty minutes if the man was in peak condition and not under the effect of any stimulants - because that's how long it took _him_ to wake up from that particular sparring exercise - which considering the guy he knocked out was a smoker, was probably a paranoid estimate. He had to 'case the joint', as it were.

The only thing he had to fear was that this guy wasn't the last in the smoking queue. Or that his buddy was waiting right behind the door and would question why his friend, a "Randall Ezno" (_Weird name if I ever heard one!_) had suddenly changed his rather uncharismatic burn scars (that looked like the guy kissed a shrapnel IED) for the geometrically correct electric burns Shepard had. Although, on closer inspection, Ezno even looked a bit like Shepard. Probably wouldn't pass close scrutiny (wrong eye colour, wrong haircut but the uniform cap would conceal that), but as far as security cameras were probably concerned, he was safe. He pressed the passcard to the scanner next to the door, watching it turn from amber to green with satisfaction, as he strode into the belly of the beast.


	15. Chapter 15 - Integration

**INTEGRATION**

Beyond the door, a white hallway lay ominously in wait, its bright lights and flawlessly polished tiled floor the very embodiment of all evil in the universe. It was also completely devoid of any visible guards, cameras, windows or whatever, and it terminated in unremarkable metal double doors of a freight elevator big enough to allow two gurneys to be rolled in side-by-side. Presumably, its insides were large enough to actually accommodate that, too, Shepard mused as he touched the passcard to the next card-reader, summoning the elevator.

He thanked whatever gods (or goddesses) were watching over him when it arrived empty and fully compliant with his expectations about its inner structure. There were no floor selection buttons, merely one button on either end next to the doors. Assuming that it was because the elevator only had two stops and the other side's doors opened on the other floor, Shepard pressed the button next to the closed doors and nodded acknowledgingly at the closing of the doors he entered through. Logic, it seemed, was key in elevator design no matter the era.

The doors he was waiting by opened up after the elevator came to halt after a surprisingly short descent, allowing him into another hallway much like the first one, except this one had multicoloured lines along the walls and floor - navigational cues, Shepard guessed, not dissimilar from things he himself had seen in laboratories in his time. He started down it, hoping for some sort of schematic or floor plan or whatever, passing one identical barely noticeable white door after another. He tried aiming for the thickest concentration of the lines as these would, logically, lead to some sort of nexus from where he could figure out his next move.

Shepard raised his eyes at the pillar in the intersection he's reached, supporting a large screen that was showing the very thing he was looking for - a floor plan of the underground facility, or at least this floor of it, with a warning sign saying "intrusion alert" showing on a room that seemed to be somewhere far down the leftwards hallway from where he was now standing.

"Busy day, huh, Ezno?" a voice greeted him from behind. Thankfully, the relaxed tone did not set him off, because surely jumping up in shock would have blown his cover. Shepard grunted agreement in the most gruff voice he could muster - this Ezno guy didn't look like a falcetto by any meaning of the word - hoping it would be sufficient to curtail any attempts at conversation. He was half-successful.

"Yeah, mine was crap too. Good thing I got that vacation coming up, the wife has pretty much talked me to death about wanting to go to the sea-side," the other guy rambled on as he matched Shepard's walking pace, oblivious of the identity of his listener. "You married? I don't recall you saying."

Shepard mustered a negative grunt that came out as more of a growl, hoping that conveyed enough of "Not gonna happen" to the other man.

"Good. Stay that way, free and- crap, look at the board!" he exclaimed, nearly jumping up himself.

Shepard growled acknowledgingly, wondering what sort of person this Ezno was if this was viable conversation contribution as far as the other guy was concerned.

"The ventilation system? AGAIN? Hoof it, Ezno, the boss will have our heads for this if someone gets in on a low night!" his 'partner' exclaimed before setting off at a brisk run in the direction suggested by the map. Shepard looked at the security camera hanging right above the screen and looking straight at him, shrugged and ran afterwards.

* * *

The door was as white as all the others, and equally unmarked, except for a red light flashing through the white plastic paneling above it, indicating this was the one the alarm was sounded in. The guard brought his SMG to bear, indicating for Shepard to follow suit, and took point in a standard breaching maneuver. As they stepped into the half-lit ventilation control room, Shepard carefully closed the door after himself trying to make as little sound as possible - he didn't quite want the intruder, whoever they were, taking him out because he was dressed as a guard, which meant alerting them was a no-no - and that was what saved him. When he looked back at the other guy, he was already on the floor, out cold, a dark-clothed figure standing over him. Shooting in such a confined space could have been actually dangerous - he wasn't quite sure how the ventilation systems of this era compared to the ones he knew so well, but risking scalding was not in his plans in the least. The figure struck out with a kick, which he blocked with his gun before tossing it behind him on the strap, reaching a hand out to try and grab the attacker by their foot. His fingers closed on empty air as a well-aimed fist came crashing down on the side of his head, but that was nothing compared to the average MAKO landing, and Shepard shook it off, managing to grab his opponent by the wrist this time.

He twisted on the balls of his feet, reaching his other hand out for the ribs and trying a toss, but while he was getting ready for it, the figure hooked a leg against his shin, trying to trip him up. Remembering Samara's lessons, he shifted his center of mass, slightly bending one knee and used the wrist he was still clutching for leverage to instead toss his opponent across his own leg.

_(Time to end this, we shouldn't be trying to kill each other-)_

As he reached around for his gun to try and stick up the other guy with it, he made a serious mistake, one he only realized as he found the barrel of a handgun pointed at his face.

"Freeze!" the figure announced in what was clearly a woman's voice before drawing back in what seemed to be shock (it was hard to tell through the balaclava Shepard only just noticed she was wearing), "Wait, Shepard? You're Shepard?"

"The uniform's not mine, I just borrowed it," he replied instead of confirmation, "Laundry day, you know how it goes."

The woman pulled off her mask, revealing a sharp powerful jaw, thin pursed lips, an all-too-familiar nose and a pair of cold blue eyes. The only alien-ness, ironically, lay in the short black curls of hair and, of course, the pale pink of her skin, instead of the pale blue he was more used to. The only question that remained was whether it was the mother or the daughter he was looking at.

_(I don't know about Randall Ezno's day, but mine is certainly past being merely "crap" at this point.)_

"Maureen Rankin, CIA," she finally said, answering an unasked question, her reply making Shepard shudder involuntarily.

* * *

He did not regret siding with Morinth against her mother when the situation presented itself - she was far more predictable and easier to manipulate into helping him against the Collectors, and her eventual desertion of the Normandy did not matter in the long run, with the planet facing total evolutionary extinction, the actions of a single nymphomaniac serial killer were a grain of sand on a beach.

He had reconciled with that sin of his past a long while ago, long before encountering Morinth in London during the final push, clad in Asari commando leathers, joining the fight against the Reapers with her sisters from a race that feared and loathed her. After all, even a vicious predator had to understand that you cannot stand aside when the onrushing tide threatens to obliterate your food source. She paid for his folly with her life, crushed beneath a collapsing building.

* * *

"To what do I owe the honour of ranking a CIA agent on my case?" Shepard asked, trying for nonchalance. He failed, losing control of the edge in his voice - a combination of frustration of the trickling time before the real Ezno would awake, if he hasn't already, the rush of memories associated with an Asari succubus who this woman so hauntingly reminded him of, and the very real confusion about this turn of events.

"You don't. I'm not here for you," she replied, lowering and then holstering her gun, "Though you are welcome to help me, since you're already here."

"Then how do you know me?" he asked, incredulously, moving to help her pull the incapacitated guard aside from view of the doorway without missing a beat.

"Read the files on most of the patients we could identify from the satellite imagery," she explained, Shepard mentally thanking her for not referring to any technology he could not understand, "Cerberus have been quite busy here, but didn't go the whole nine yards on concealing this place properly, and an automatic search for all known MIAs in the recent years has pinged this place on five or ten people too many, and whoosh - I'm here, trying to get some answers."

"Alone?" Shepard asked, straightening out and wiping the sweat of the fight from his brow. His muscles were still tense, he still wasn't sure he could trust her - but he had to keep that to himself.

"Quieter that way. And now here you are, like an unbidden knight errant," she quipped with an all-too-familiar sad non-smile, "I've only got one question though - Your file noted you weren't very good at any forms of unarmed combat. Where did you learn Krav Maga?"


End file.
